About 

Certain stories satisfy.

Stories in which people learn new things about themselves by decoding the communities they move through. (Like Zuko in Avatar the Last Airbender). In which subjectivity and objectivity challenge and complement each other. The sort of tales in which life gets easier and harder seemingly at once. I want to inspire conversation about contradiction.

I’m a selfish and impatient reader. I’m averse to books with neat, tidy endings, where tropes drive the plot, where you can tell the girl with the porcelain skin and ocean blue eyes will fall in love with the bad boy, a sort of Taylor Swift Ronald Reagan era hellscape- where folks that look like me or share similar experiences are definitely not the target audience.

Maybe I’m a bit of a masochist too. I love stories that leave me a little unsettled, ravenous, that muck up the waters a bit. I prefer stories with unreliable narrators, multiple perspectives, beauty and love mixed with pain. Pointed discomfort. The particular. The bittersweet.

My writing draws from such sources. It highlights subtle personal dynamics and balances expressive diction with clarity in message. It works in service to marginalized narratives and in defense of sensitivity and feminity. It prioritizes a micro rather than macro perspective. My values of intentionality, playfulness, and compassion knit my work together.

I’m repelled by loose, inaccessible, scientific abstraction devoid of emotion. I’m bored by purple prose. And excessiveness. Except in vulnerability. Or imagery. Or colorful lines dancing on the page. And pops of highly saturated color placed just right.

Balancing repulsions and partialities, my illustration reflects these themes through diverse representation.

Growing up, fantasy was a source of comfort and escape. I drew fan art of my favorite book covers, spot illustrations, and spreads. But eventually, I got bored. My love of reading and the impact certain stories had on me nurtured a tendency to revel or savor. And observational drawing helped me channel this energy. When I wasn’t reading or swinging on the swingset, I’d sit on the benches at recess drawing the chain-link fence, the plants poking through the gravel, the cars in the parking lot. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that immense richness can be found in quiet moments of everyday reality. I still engage with work requiring slow, close looking.

My illustrations connect to and make sense of the world.