Can I use an array as a model feature?
Found a fantastic answer here that avoids high-level black box libraries.   

Essentially, numerical floats are categorized into bins based on boundary values which are determined by their distribution. Text tokens are hashed with column ID, and then concatenated with other columns' hashed tokens via an interaction array. All hashed tokens, whether or not they have in interaction, are fed as inputs into the model.

That's the gist of it.