My research centers on Appalachian resilience, shaped by my upbringing in rural East Tennessee. I draw connections between mycelial networks, endangered species that my biologist father worked with, and a rare, invented varmint species, Foofs, considering how all reflect lives left behind by systems of power. Through my work in printmaking, painting, and installation, I stay connected to the people and places I am thinking about. At the center of my practice is Appalachian Futurism: a forward- looking creative framework that moves beyond narratives of colonialism and exploitation to imagine new futures grounded in collective agency and possibility. Can a region whose histories have been extracted, caricatured, and repeatedly framed as obsolete imagine futures beyond merely subsisting? What does it mean to insist on a future?

I’ve been really into Donna Haraway’s ideas about futures lately. She proposes that survival in damaged worlds requires sustained engagement rather than escape. So, futurity becomes an ongoing reckoning with place: its ecological precarity and histories of extraction. To insist on a future is to stay with the trouble of it. I’m exploring these ideas through speculative strategies including queer visibility and ecological metaphor. I’m thinking a lot about what queer rural futures look like, and how I can position forms of Appalachian life often rendered incompatible with the region as already embedded within its social and environmental fabric.