I have been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993, when as a teenager I made my first zine. Publishing as an artistic practice entails researching, editing, writing, designing, printing, hand-binding, and distributing. While the work is not peer-reviewed in its making, it is externally evaluated in its reception. My publications have been awarded honors by major design organizations, and have been collected and exhibited by notable institutions. Essential to my publishing practice is making these editions affordable and accessible to the general public, which I do by regularly tabling at art book fairs. I also research and write about publishing as an artistic practice: I write for the College Book Art Association (CBAA) Book Arts Theory Blog and regularly present papers at their national conference. I currently have two different publishing projects:

Alder & Frankia (est. 2016) publishes new collaborations, and anthologies and reissues of feminist material from archives. Recent Alder & Frankia publications include the book Our daily lives have to be a satisfaction in themselves, documenting 40 years of Bloodroot, a feminist vegetarian restaurant, bookstore, and radical work collective in Bridgeport, CT. A current ongoing project is the Efemmera Reissue series, through which I reissue second and third wave feminist ephemera as new art publications. In May 2020, I released the publication Saving Seeds, a special 1987 issue of Maize: A Lesbian Country Magazine. In summer 2020 I have been awarded a UConn REP grant and a travel grant from Duke University in order to continue this work. I am currently working with K.D. Codish, former head of Police Training & Education at the New Haven Police Department in the 1990s, to reissue her work in feminist policing. When possible due to COVID-19 restrictions, I plan to travel to archives to continue this work.

Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts (ILSSA, est. 2008), a collaboration with fellow artist-publisher Bridget Elmer, is a union for reflective creative practice, focused on improving the immaterial working conditions of impractical laborers. ILSSA publishes contemplative tools and resources; organizes participatory projects, exhibitions, and events; facilitates an annual group residency; and observes an annual holiday, the Festival to Plead for Skills. ILSSA's projects and publications often take the form of a call-and-response. Calls have included a survey asking members to assess their working conditions as impractical laborers, a workbook inviting members to ruminate on their relationship and experience with time, a chronobiological self-test, a request for member manifestos, and an inventory of essential tools for living. Participation in these projects often leads to additional publications and exhibitions. For 2020-21 our plans include: publishing A Trying Time and the 2^nd State of the ILSSA Union; creating a new mail art piece for the Aldrich Museum’s exhibition 2020; a “solo” exhibition at IS Projects in Fort Lauderdale, FL; participation in online art book fairs (online due to COVID-19).

In teaching graphic design, my goal is four-fold: to develop students’ conceptual and critical thinking abilities; to hone strong formal skills; to cultivate curiosity in an exploratory working process; and to ignite enthusiasm for their work. I have found that students progress just as professionals do: through constant practice with engaging problems. Central to this concept of design-as-practice is the development of a working methodology: a way to approach problems. The more tangible, relevant, and meaningful the problem, the better the student engagement with the process. By assigning due dates for different project stages and requiring students to keep and exhibit process and research records, students are accountable to their work, and their ways of thinking and making become transparent to both them and myself.
  I encourage students to redefine the problem in their own words before researching and sketching. All-class meetings are helpful in the earliest and latest stages of the project, so students can learn to verbalize their ideas about each other’s work as well as their own. When the project is underway, I find that class-time is best spent as studio time, with small group and one-on-one meetings to push the project’s development and refinement toward completion. In these ways I encourage my students to embrace designing as a process, both conceptual and formal, and emphasize this process alongside the finished product.
 In order for students to engage with each other, they must feel safe enough to be vulnerable, in both showing their work and in speaking their opinions. I cultivate a nurturing class environment by soliciting class ground rules from students. At the beginning of the semester, whether teaching first-year students or seniors, we reestablish what makes a productive critique and classroom.
 In teasing out my students’ ideas and intentions for their work, I enjoy asking questions such that students arrive at their own answers. Central to this is helping each student identify their strengths and interests, so that they can continue to hone them in a lifelong creative practice. My goal is for students to learn to ask questions of each other, of all designed artifacts and systems they encounter, and ultimately, of themselves, long after they leave my classroom. In this way through my teaching I advocate design as a critical discipline, and encourage inquiry, curiosity, and commitment.
 By definition, design practice does not exist in a vacuum: it is contextualized within the world we live in now, as well as the complex histories that describe how we got here. A design education is incomplete if it does not nourish students’ curiosity about and enthusiasm for shaping our world. I seek to bring the world into the classroom through relevant briefs, and to encourage students to design for what they care about most.

For fall 2020, in order to help students grow in this historic moment, I've been studying how to decolonize the teaching of graphic design, and I have taken numerous CETL offerings, including the online short course Preparing for Distance Learning. Graphic Design, Typography, Book Arts, Publishing as Art Practice