An extended bio from the author

 

 

I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, raised between two households and with, eventually, three siblings. My mother was a big reader, having been an English major in college, and some of my earliest memories are of her scanning the bookshelves for books for me to read. I read a lot as a child, and also wrote poetry. She claims I recited my first poem before I knew how to write—something about a tree. The first one I remember was a limerick about a dragonfly. Early on I discovered Emily Dickinson and found much in her writing with which to identify. At age nine I attempted to read through the Old Testament, though I grew up in an atheistic household. I read it for its rhythms and stories and because I wanted the idea of God. Leviticus slowed me down. I also read novels, of course, and at some point was reading mostly nineteenth-century ones; Jane Austen spoke my mind. I fell for Will Ladislaw.

I went to high school in Brookline, and there I was lucky enough to have fantastic English teachers. Margaret Metzger was, and continues to be, a necessary guide. She (and my mother) taught me how to write paragraphs. Margaret Metzger not only read poems to us, she performed them. “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” she said, and then quietly walked out of the room. That was the end of class and I was stunned.

I went to Barnard College, hoping to become a writer. But in the meantime, I had fallen into dancing, and at Barnard I danced all the time. My friends and I made dances in hallways and classrooms and staircases. We created evening-length pieces with text, music, and sculpture. We went to performances and classes all over the city. The first time I saw the Merce Cunningham Company, I cried. Also when I saw Trisha Brown. In my sophomore year, I spent a summer sutdying with seminal dance improvisers Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, and Nancy Stark Smith. This summer not only shaped my future for the next decade, it also shaped my aesthetic. I began to understand abstraction, irony, juxtaposition, and chance, and I grew deeply invested in improvisation, not only as a practice for the studio, but also as performance. In 1991, with Sondra Loring, I founded the annual Improvisation Festival, which featured over eighty international artists for two weeks of performances and workshops throughout the city. Sondra and I ran this event together for seven years. Doing this showed me that, for me, being an artist must also mean supporting other artists—that’s when the work really takes off.

For ten years after graduating, I danced. Mostly I performed in New York with local companies and choreographers. But I also traveled around the country and into Canada and Mexico to teach and perform. We danced in churches, outdoor stages, abandoned buildings, bars, PS122, Dancespace Project, Judson, DTW, BAM, sidewalks, parks. Dancing is a collaborative art, always, and my community was close, supportive, and curious, not only about dance, but also about theater, visual art, and poetry. Many of the dances I made or was part of incorporated language, and after a time I began to create texts for choreographers. In this way, I stayed connected to my original intention.

In 1995 I went to New York University for an MFA in poetry. I did this in order to transition myself out of dance, but while studying, I was also performing and traveling regularly. The real transition happened a year later when my husband and I had our first child, Benjamin. After Benjamin was born, dancing became less viable. The babysitters were making more per hour than I was in rehearsal. My final professional performance was a piece by Jody Oberfelder for seven mothers and their babies. We preformed throughout the city and on television. It was fitting that in my final dance I never put the baby down.

In 2001, my family and I moved to Berkeley so that I could attend UC Berkeley’s doctorate program in English. There I studied Victorian Literature and was again blessed with an exhilarating community. I studied poetry with Lyn Hejinain and Heather McHugh, and literature with Kent Pucket, Steven Goldsmith, Catherine Gallagher, and Sharon Marcus. As important was the thriving poetry scene of the Bay Area, alive with its history. My second child, Alice, was born a few months after we arrived. Meanwhile, jasmine, heliotrope, roses, calla lilies, plum trees, honey suckle, eucalyptus, and the war.

My first book, Mead: An Epithalamion, won the University of Georgia Press’s Contemporary Poetry Prize and was published in 2004. Cole Swensen was the judge. I had never met her, had heard her read only once, but that year I’d been carrying around her book Noon, reading it over and over, studying its delicate changes. In 2006 Alice James Books accepted my second book, Equivocal. That year we left California to move to Denver, Colorado, and I began teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder. That year also, my husband, Tim Roberts, and I started Counterpath Press (www.counterpathpress.org), which we have been running with ever since. We’ve now published eighteen titles: poetry, fiction, critical prose, many of the books in translation. Publishing is an exhausting joy. Earlier this year, Eileen Myles selected my manuscript Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines as a National Poetry Series selection; it comes out from Coffee House Press later in 2010.

Now with three children—the third, Lucy, was born in 2007—the press, and full-time teaching, the days are packed, but no more so than they were when I was biking around New York between classes and rehearsals. In fact, my focus feels similar. I’m in motion much of the time, but the ground is always the art. Now my collaborators are my husband, my children (the older two also write poems), my colleagues, my fellow writers here and around the country, and my students. Denver is the country’s sweetest and best-kept secret; though mountains are no oceans, they lift. We write every day between 5 and 7:30. The sun is rising, the kids are waking up.