About Me

Hi, I'm Amelia.

I decided to be a writer in the third grade, after a confrontation with a teacher over a realistic fiction story about a talking mouse. I’ve been experimenting with structure ever since, playing with the boundaries between poetry and prose, truth and fiction, words on the page and out loud. I’ve created poetry, comedy, rap, fiction, non-fiction, lyrics and blends of all of the above.

I am fascinated by the way we value stories and by how we choose to craft them.  I’m interested in the balance between speaking my own language and being understood – in being my own translator.  I believe that language is both precise and abstract, that the meaning of a word depends on a myriad of factors.  I believe word choice and even sounds matter as much as plot.

I’m learning that performance is vital to the experience of my words, and I’m interested in exploring performative possibilities for text outside of the traditional play, finding under-explored places of overlap among artistic disciplines.

I’ve picked up a few good tricks from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Stories, the Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, First Person Arts, and the Rutgers Camden Summer Writing Conference. My work has been performed as part of the First Person Arts Festival and the SoLow Festival (So Cruel: a sibling serenade), and my dance writing has been published on Thinking Dance. I’ve worked with students at Mighty Writers, Mighty Post, and Camp Sojourner Girls’ Leadership Camp. When I’m not writing, I’m working in marketing at Azavea, a fabulous local tech b-corp, and in operations at APIARY Literary Magazine, the busiest bookish-est bees in town.

I often enjoy writing poems about whales and/or bicycles that appear to be metaphors, but are actually about whales and/or bicycles, and certainly not about boys, let alone you.