She is a founding member of Q-WAVE, a grassroots organization for queer women and trans/gender variant people of Asian/South Asian/Pacific Islander descent in the tri-state area. She received her doctorate in English at New York University in 2009 and has also taught at UC-Santa Barbara and CUNY-Hunter College. She teaches and has written articles on topics in the fields of Asian American Studies, Trans Studies, and Disability Studies. She is working on a book manuscript entitled Transgender Transnationalism: Immigrant Genders and Sexualities in 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature.