A doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, Orchid Tierney researches landfills and their relationships to contemporary poetry, poetics, and media. Her dissertation draws on interdisciplinary methodologies from discard studies, media archaeology, and the digital humanities to explore the issues related to contemporary waste displacement and the afterlives of toxic discards in media art and poetry. She received an MCW from the University of Auckland in 2010 and an MA in English from the University of Otago in 2013.