who i am.

I am queer and a survivor of multiple forms of violence. I began this work in the mid-2000’s raising money for organizations, transitioned into being a rape crisis counselor in an emergency room and worked for a short time in a community organizing project before I left to focus on putting together an anthology highlighting LGBTQ survivors experiences, which was released in April 2016. Over my time working in anti-violence work, I became acutely aware that the larger mainstream anti-sexual violence movement is not (yet) equipped to meet the needs of LGBTQ populations. I also felt myself drawn to healing work, both supporting others in their process and working more closely with healing my own trauma, depression, anxiety & substance misuse.

The first survivor I ever began work with was myself, as I began to realize I hadn’t addressed years on years of trauma resulting in complex PTSD. I love being in community with other survivors. It’s where I feel most at home and seen. I love doing work outside the medical industrial complex that supports healing and supports people as they give language to their own experience.

A queer and trans affirming, trauma-informed herbalist and breathworker, I offer sliding scale care as a practitioner in my own practice Corpus Ritual and through The Breathe Network. I also offer (and have offered in the past) writing and breathwork workshops at healing centers throughout NYC, Sounds True One, LGBTQ centers, ETSY, a Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish healing center, a needle exchange and harm reduction clinic, Mailchimp, veterans hospitals, online with the Transformative Language Arts Network, sexual violence resource centers, the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do?, and at colleges and universities. I am tuned in to hearing and translating the stories of our bodies, tuned into somatic and embodied expression to move through the places that are stuck, hurting and grieving.

I’ve also had opportunities to share my work across the country, leading breathwork, herb workshops, giving keynotes and lectures at a number of universities, colleges, non-profits, and conferences. I am the creator, host, and teacher of Sounds True’s 16 week BreathWork program. I am also part of the faculty for classes and trainings with The Breathe Network, Breath Liberation Society, Breathwork for Recovery’s training program, and Collectively Rooted.

I’m the author of The Power of Breathwork: Simple Practices to Promote Wellbeing (arrived in March of 2020) and the editor of the one-of-a-kind anthology Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement. I’ve had writing published in VIDA, 580 Split, HandJob Zine, OCHO: A Journal of Queer Arts, the Outrider Review, The Establishment, on The Feminist Wire, and many more. I was also the creative nonfiction editor for the (now no longer) Hematopoiesis Press, an online literary journal focused on bodies and language.

I work towards providing care that is in line with and accountable to healing justice and disability justice spaces (and want to recognize the legacy of activists, writers and healers who have been creating a language and framework for these spaces for a long time as they ground them in queer and trans communities, poor and working class communities and communities of color-- people like Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Mia Mingus, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Stacey Milburn, Molly Boeder Harris, billie rain, Ejeris Dixon, Dori Midnight, Emi Koyama and so many other people). I want to provide care that is accessible in multiple ways; through interrogating how ableism and oppression impacts people and how we are able to access care, through recognizing the impacts of racism, transphobia and transmisogyny, homophobia, fatphobia, slut-shaming and classism and on and on.

I work through a harm reduction lens meaning I support people where they are at, my process is people-centered, and I bring curiosity, not judgement, to substance use and misuse. I’ve been lucky to lead somatic writing workshops at a needle exchange in NYC from 2016-2019.

A graduate of Goddard College's MA program in 2016, I am finishing a book project that translates the embodied experience of a queer survivor of multiple forms of violence. In it I weave together theory, social justice movement work, literary sources, creative non-fiction, embroidery, radical somatic and healing arts practices and more.

I feel a kindred kind of love and respect for survivors of multitude of traumas. I admire our willingness to sit with what is profoundly complicated and difficult. I admire our tenacity and resilience, our searching for healing, our willingness to settle into the life-long continuum of healing. I admire our desires to shift and grow into aliveness.