I wrote this poetry book from the perspective of a daughter of displaced people & how residual effects of trauma still linger intergenerationally. My family were immigrants who had a path, yet still had no guidebook to this place called America & all of her confusing ways.

The book is mainly dedicated to protecting children from the harm it causes: being taken from their home, running with parents / relatives / strangers from traumatic conditions, and trying to adapt in a new environment so foreign from anything they’ve known. The cruel act of taking children away from their parents—after a long, harsh journey of emotional & physical distress—is psychologically damaging for life.

I’m donating 75% of proceeds of sales from my book to The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES).

Buy here & I will post each donation & tag (if you don’t prefer a shout-out, let me know). At this time, poetry can heal and create awareness, and mass action is what we need now more than ever. Let’s keep fighting & show that all humanity is not lost: WE CARE. And as Americans, as HUMAN BEINGS, we should be PROTECTING CHILDREN!

In a few weeks I will be presenting my cinepoems from White Stockings at Stanford. Many, many thanks to visual artist Tess Cortes for her vision and aesthetic. She made each woman come to life!

I’ve written and produced my final poetry book, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). It took roughly two years to write. After one year of a frightening, violating political climate and three years’ estrangement from my family, this book was a labor of necessity. MOFA is an epigenetic poetic diary that explores inherited trauma from my mother’s side of the family (displaced from North Caucasus -> Lithuania -> Brazil -> Canada -> US) and my father’s side (displaced from Lithuania -> Germany -> US).

The book is now available via Lulu from Secret Airplanes Press.

I want to sincerely thank Robert Hansen at Poems-For-All for publishing two of my poems as mini-books to be “scattered like seeds” into the universe.

Here’s a brief cinepoem teaser to re-introduce my poetry collection, White Stockings (2015/2016). I put this together in Adobe Spark in about 5 hours (my second attempt at video production/editing). I’m collaborating with an actual, real-life, super-talented visual artist, Tess Cortes (check her out, she’s quite amazing). I’ll be unveiling about 5-6 cinepoems at the AABS Conference at Stanford in June.