I come to poetry from a background of music performance and scholarship and the study and love of literature. I believe in the philosophy of tikkun olam, “repair of the world,” and I believe that through art, I can leave the world a better place that it was when I arrived. Inspired by history, language, and the mythopoeic, I create works that address social justice issues, particularly those involving women; the environment; and the nature of compassion. My work includes poems, lyrics, libretti, and plays. In my poetry, I’m interested in how language works in creating a story or a moment. I consider word histories, regionalisms, and slang, and often use wordplay. I use words taken from an influential source or write using a meter from such a source. In my poem “Re-Writing King Lear in a time of Pandemic,” for example, I use almost exclusively words from Shakespeare’s play and those that can be anagrammed from “King Lear” and “Covid.” I’m interested in the scientific names for plants and creatures, and use these in writing about the environment. I use place-names from history and folklore in poetry about race, destruction, and erasure. I match cadences and rhythms to the sounds the objects I write about make. I think of language and sound as a sandbox for me to work in, in all of my writing, and I create connections between words and images and meanings in ways that communicate with a wide range of readers and listeners.