I am an interdisciplinary Environmental Humanities scholar working at the intersection of arts, politics, and environmental justice. I am particularly concerned with questions related to environmental degradation, extractive industries, biodiversity, land and place, and artistic engagement with these themes.

I am currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry at University College London. I use research methods such as literary analysis, ethnography and autoethnography, archival research, research creation, and interviews to examine multispecies relationships on mining-affected landscapes.  In particular, I examine the social and environmental damages caused by Guinea’s rapidly expanding bauxite industry and how the arts can help to mitigate these effects. I recently held a research fellowship at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) at the University of Ghana and a position as Sessional Lecturer at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus, where I taught courses in sustainability, composition, and environmental literature.

My doctoral research in York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies examined the environmental history of apartheid and the response of amaXhosa poets to racial oppression and environmental injustice. My work contends that oral and vernacular language texts should receive greater consideration by postcolonial ecocritics, since the literatures of historically marginalized groups often have the most to say about human relationships with natural environments and experiences of environmental injustice. This research was published in the monograph Of Land, Bones, and Money as well as in several academic articles.

My creative writing has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, Qwerty, Room Magazine, The Goose, Geez Magazine and Northword. In 2008, I received the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers from the Writers Trust of Canada and have been long- and short-listed for the CBC poetry prize. I have held creative residencies at the Al Purdy A-Frame in Ontario, Canada; Cove Park in Scotland; Joya: Arte + Ecologìa in Spain; and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada, and have received creative writing grants from the Canada Council and the British Columbia Arts Council.