Both American Millennial, a poetry collection, and Between Drowning and Drought, a memoir, interrogate the overlap between personal and collective traumatic events by looking at the defining moments of my own adolescence alongside the defining moments of my generation – the much-maligned millennials. Split into three primary sections covering the years 2001, 2008, and 2020, American Millennial acts as a personal and generational archive in verse, using a variety of poetic forms and overlapping narrative threads to examine the connection between iconic national moments and personal life events. Between Drowning and Drought, as a coming-of-age memoir, tells some of the same stories as the poetry collection, but finetunes the lens, using ecosystems of water to explore the unraveling of my family and the outsized impact military life had on our – and the nation’s – environmental, physical, and psychological health.