I am a PhD student at the University of Chicago, pursuing a joint-degree between the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of English. I teach in the Creative Writing Department, in the English Department, and in the Humanities Core, and consider teaching to be a primary pleasure and dedication. My research focuses on the literary and philosophical history of apology and apologetic forms. At the University of Chicago I co-founded and run the interdisciplinary working group: “Contemporary Migrations: Poetics, Theory, Practice.” I also maintain a personal creative writing practice, and my poetry and essays appear or are forthcoming in the Chicago Review, SixByEight, Prodigal, and Gulf Coast.My teaching is motivated by an understanding that the classroom is at its best when it structures a safe space for conversation, failure, and collaborative thinking. I believe that the humanities classroom is unique in the opportunity it presents for individuals with a variety of positionalities, pasts, and present situations to sit in the same space and examine the same objects—literary, archival, and otherwise—and to put their overlapping and conflicting perspectives into a conversation around that central contested object. I am attentive to the importance of engaging themes of gender and sexuality, race and racialization, documentation status, disability, and class inequity, even in courses where they are not primary topics. I do this understanding that these perspectives are valuable, especially as they can charge a discussion and bring the lived stakes of reading a text into focus. I also do this from the belief that the literature I teach is inextricable from the wider social and political contexts of the 20th and 21st centuries in which it is produced, and from the audiences to which it speaks.