Nan is a queer poet, Great Salt Lake celebrant, and vigil keeper.
She created the practice of River Writing in order to foster voice and authentic connection. This community-held writing practice is designed for anyone willing to pick up a pen. Everyone is invited. A recent PBS documentary highlights River Writing as a method of repair for what is broken in our relationship with the natural world.
Her debut poetry collection, prayers not meant for heaven, was published by Toad Hall Editions in the summer of 2021. Nan's story lake woman leaving, a modern myth, was awarded the 2022 Alfred Lambourne prize by Friends of Great Salt Lake. In the summer of 2023, Nan was honored by Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall with a Mayor’s Artist Award. As poet-in-residence on Antelope Island, Nan led day-and-night vigils on behalf of the imperiled Great Salt Lake throughout the 2022 and 2023 Utah State legislative sessions.
During her weeks on the receding lake shore, she composed irreplaceable, a collective praise poem for great Salt Lake, containing over 400 lake-facing voices. The book was published in fall of 2024 by Moon in the Rye Press. The ode is a community cry for the full restoration of the ecosystem.
The 2024 and 2025 winter vigils featured daily demonstrations for the lake at the Utah State Capitol throughout the entirety of the legislative sessions. Advocates of all ages walked with waves in silence each morning and celebrated the lake’s species with jubilant singing and dancing in the evening. Thousands of people have participated in over one hundred demonstrations during the sessions. Nan and her accomplices at Making Waves Artists Collaborative organized and led these diverse and inclusive demonstrations on behalf of the lake.
Nan lives twenty miles southeast of the receding lake shore with her Turkish spouse and beloved border collie-lab friend. She advocates for Rights of Nature, legally defensible personal rights for ecosystems. Her work gives voice to their inherent right to live, flourish, and evolve in natural way. The words emerge from a devotion to repairing the breach between humans and the rest of the sentient, singing earth.