Professor of English, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Home Place

I will begin work on a collection of poems based on observations, interviews, and archival research about farming within a 30-mile radius of my own house. This radically local project is conceived as a work of listening, in order to chronicle changes in agricultural labor and life, without ignoring the national and global implications of those changes. The poems eventually will be published alongside images by documentary photographer Steven Rubin in a book that will not simply eulogize the family farm, but document farmers’ determination to stay on the land and to grow and raise food, despite challenges from climate and policies favoring large corporations.