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 bilingual and bicultural and say that I am “home” no matter where I am. I received (or claimed) my undergraduate education through 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, 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. Since completing my graduate degree, I have made a living and a life as an educator at various public universities, including UC Davis, Montclair State University, and now at Hunter College, where I am Acting Director of their Asian American Studies Program.
My practice continues to center upon dislocation, translation, intertextuality, and memory. I recently completed a manuscript of poems, entitled A Machine Wrote This Song, and I am in deep with a long essay entitled “The Autonomic System.” In addition, I am restarting my “Projections” project, looking at maps, the law, and the language of forgetting.