[She/They]
Born in Oakland, California in the early 70s, I spent the first seventeen years of my life living in the suburbs of both Stockholm and San Francisco, between the golden state and the welfare state. I grew up translingual and transcultural, chronically engaged in attempts to pass no matter where I was. I completed my undergraduate education at the University of California campuses at Davis and Berkeley, and remain indebted to teachers such as Wendy Ho, Thom Gunn, Kathleen Moran, Sandra McPherson, Ruth Frankenberg, Colleen Lye, June Jordan, and Barbara Christian for educating me in the pleasures and contingencies of being a critical scholar and practitioner of many things.
I moved to New York in the fall of 1999, with my two close friends A and M. We flew TWA. I worked at MoMA, index Magazine, and doing various odd jobs to put myself through graduate school at Bard College, where I worked with Ann Lauterbach, Lynne Tillman, John Yau, and Matthew Sharpe in particular. Since completing my graduate degree, I have made a living and a life as an educator and administrator at various universities, including UC Davis, Montclair State University, Columbia University, and Hunter College, where I directed their Asian American Studies Program for nearly a decade. I now make a living as a translator and educator. In the spring of 2018, I taught a translation workshop in the MFA Program in Writing at Columbia University. In Sweden, I have developed and am currently teaching the third iteration of “To Translate,” a year-long multilingual course in translation in the creative writing program at Biskops Arnö Nordens Folkhögskola.
My literary and artistic practices continue to revolve around dislocation, translation, decolonization, and memory. In addition to my 2018 collection A Machine Wrote This Song, I am in deep with a longer prose project entitled “The Autonomic System.” Since the fall of 2018, I am a doctoral candidate in artistic research at Valand Academy of Art & Design at the University of Gothenburg, working on Feeling Translation, an interdisciplinary artistic research project situated between Sweden and North America. Methodologically, I draw upon histories, strategies, and forms located within, or expanded through, US ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, literary theory, and critical university studies.
Photo credit: Charles Richardson