I'm a college literature instructor, wanderer, autodidact, teetotaler with lots of experiences collected both locally and globally. I'm not much of a partier or barfly; rather, I spend a lot of my time at cafes around this city, literary events, and galleries. I lead a pretty quiet life that I find fulfilling. I spend a lot of my time with a core group of friends while also working on my poetry and non-fiction writing projects. My teaching schedule affords me lots of free time--it's most definitely NOT a 9 to 5 job.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

I had a great experience with Couchsurfing--both on the surfing and hosting end--in 2008, 2009, and 2010. At the time I lived in a ballroom converted into a huge apartment with three roommates and two cats. Since then I've moved out on my own, in an apartment in the same building, but I still have the two cats (Persi and MoMo).

I've surfed couches in Zagreb, Split, Munich, Copenhagen, and Montreal (in that order). And I've hosted surfers from Estonia, Latvia, Denmark, Canada, France, Germany--and this doesn't count the surfers I "co-hosted" with roommates from as far away as Turkmenistan.

The past few years I've taken a break from couchsurfing to focus on my job, but now I'm looking forward to resuming the cultural exchange.

Interests

90s hip-hop
bicycle commuting
sustainable living
obscure slo-core electronic music (i.e., ambient)
90s punk records
poetics/poetry theory
literary theory
French and German philosophy
post-marxism
American literature

Music, Movies, and Books

Music, lately (Dec. '14): Run the Jewels 2, Stars of the Lid, Loscil, Tim Hecker, Bessie Smith, Boards of Canada.

Movies, lately (Dec. '14): Computer Chess is the best movie I've seen in a long time. Love documentaries, esp. Stranger with a Camera and Agnes Varda's Gleaners and I.

Books: for the past couple months I've been reading a lot of nineteenth-century American literature--poetry, fiction, theory--in preparation for nineteenth-century American Poetry course in the Spring Semester of 2015. So, lots of Emerson, Thoreau, but also under-appreciated women and African-American poets.

My favorite novelists: James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Willa Cather.

What I Can Share with Hosts

The space that I have to share is a spacious one-bedroom apartment. There is a bottom-of-the-line IKEA couch that folds out into a bed as well as a twin mattress that I can set out on the living room floor. I have a good wifi connection and a fully equipped kitchen.

Important: I live on the South Side of the city, the Bridgeport neighborhood to be exact. It's the hardscrabble, rough edges part of town--working class single family homes and old factories, some still in use and others converted into vertical farms, galleries. There's a burgeoning grassroots arts scene where I live, though it's not too obnoxiously hip and self-conscious. There's definitely more happening in North and West Side neighborhoods such as Wicker Park, Rogers Park, Logan Square, Ukrainian Village, but my neighborhood surely has its charms. AND it's only 20 or so minutes bus or bike ride away from the downtown area.

In addition to the sleeping surface, I can share the good company of my cats; out-of-the-way knowledge about Chicago and obscure local history facts (I used to work as a bicycle tour guide); and perhaps even a bicycle (if I can get my spare bike fixed). Additionally, I have a member's pass to the Art Institute Chicago, which gets one person in for free.

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland

Countries I’ve Lived In

Denmark, United States

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