I am a Lecturer in Literary and Creative Communication for Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. From 2024-2027 I will be at work on a project entitled 'Literatures of Environment and Disability from Oceania,' funded by a Royal Society Te Apārangi Marsden Fast-Start Grant.
Previously, I was a Lecturer in Literature for the University of the South Pacific, and was the 2020-2021 Environmental Futures Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder. From 2018 to 2020 I was a Presidential Fellow at Northwestern University, where I defended my PhD dissertation in May 2020. My academic research focuses on
contemporary protest narratives, poetry, and art created by Indigenous authors from Oceania, and on stories of environment and disability in Oceania. My dissertation won the AAPS's 2021 Tracey Banivanua Mar PhD Prize and the 2020 Hagstrum Prize at Northwestern.
I was born in Whakatū Nelson, New Zealand, but spent most of my childhood in West Papua. My first novel, The Earth Cries Out (Vintage NZ, 2017) grew from these experiences. The Earth Cries Out was shortlisted for the 2018 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and long-listed for the 2018 New Zealand Book Awards.
I received my BA(Hons) in English and Master of Creative Writing (Fiction) from Massey University. I was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2016, and have had poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction published in literary magazines and anthologies in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and Malaysia.
In addition to the Marsden, my work has been supported by a CLNZ/NZSA Research Grant, a Faculty Establishment Research Grant (FREG) from THW, the "Deep Horizons" Mellon Sawyer Seminar at CU Boulder, Northwestern University's Presidential Society of Fellows, the Buffett Institute of Global Studies, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Cluster at Northwestern.