Bio

I am a scholar and educator with Mesa Scholars, a global theological cohort that resources the church worldwide, and a research fellow for the Department of Hebrew, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. My research focuses on the literary artistry of the Bible, drawing from interdisciplinary approaches, especially cognitive poetics and linguistics. I am passionate about making these insights freely available to Bible educators and readers globally. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitic Languages in 2013 and published a monograph on biblical Hebrew poetry, Unparalleled Poetry, in 2023.

While my expertise is now in biblical poetry, I did not appreciate or read much poetry at all until I fell in love with the Song of Songs in Hebrew, which serendipitously was the same time I fell in love with my husband. It is probably no accident that I have experienced my most significant shifts in thinking about biblical poetry while engaging in the most transformative, cognitive-embodied, and holistic experiences of my life: mothering and permaculture gardening. I hope that through my work more people will experience the beauty of biblical poetry.