As a brainy Jewish girl growing up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, I thought reading, writing, painting and music could solve the world’s problems. Loving poetry, I became a teacher and scholar, spending most of my career at Dartmouth College, living across the river in Vermont (and voting for Bernie), where I now garden and focus on writing poetry.

As a graduate student of the fearsome scholar and poet Allen Grossman, I studied modern poetry, but eventually specialized in early American poetry. In that sparse Puritanical field, I was lucky to meet Anne Bradstreet, the first North American woman to publish a book of poetry, and Phillis Wheatley, a poetic prodigy enslaved as a young girl in a well-off Boston family, who became the first woman of color in North America to publish a book of poetry.

This field also introduced me to formidable feminist thinkers and writers, like Adrienne Rich, who captured my intellectual strivings: “Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. … part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.” And her life-changing poetry gave me direction: “You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”

In the early 2000s, I turned to public humanities work, using teaching, film, podcasts, and digital projects to advance the causes of social justice. Inspired by the abolitionism of Angela Davis, I co-taught courses in local jails and drug rehabs through Telling My Story, work that is documented in the full-length film It’s Criminal: A Tale of Prison and Privilege, which has been screened nationally and internationally. Committed to centering Native American literature, I worked with a large team to create The Occom Circle, a freely accessible website of primary documents by and about Samson Occom, an 18th century Mohegan leader and public intellectual. During the pandemic, I worked with a collective to create HomeWorks, a website offering pedagogical materials on what 19th century women writers can teach us about the resources of staying at home. Recently, I got a start-up grant for a new website titled “Other Selves: Practicing Cross-Racial Friendship–Media, Literature and Study Guides”

For the last few years, as a rejuvenating jumpstart to my own poetic practice, I immersed myself in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The result is a year-long weekly blog called White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862. This deep dive inspired Within Flesh: In Conversation with Our Selves and Emily Dickinson, a collection of dialogic poems written with Al Salehi, a former graduate student of mine, which we published in 2024.

Most recently, I find myself called to write poems that explore my particular identity as a white Jewish woman from a particular time and place. As Paisley Rekdal says, “the story of racism does not simply happen to people of color.” These poems are my attempt to understand how my own racial thinking has been shaped, what damage it has done, and how it can be renovated. I have come to see these difficult poems, which make readers squirm—which make me squirm—in Rich’s resonating words: “I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.” ⊱✿⊰