I am a second-year PhD student in the Department of African American Studies and a member of the Poetry and Poetics Graduate Cluster. My research is focused on contemporary Black poetry collectives. I am interested in Black poets’ relationship to questions of institution building (and institutionality more broadly), mentorship, lineage, and varying definitions of community in the Post-Civil Rights era. My work thinks through the relationship between artistic and social movements (aesthetics and politics), and particularly the organizational and literary interventions that Black poets have made within and against the institutional worlds of literature. In addition to my academic work, I have worked as a teaching artist in the Bay Area, Detroit, and New York City, teaching creative writing and digital media arts workshops with young people in school and community settings.