I write nonfiction and fiction, often centering on issues of identity, longing and desire, family dynamics, and nostalgia. I've published one collection of essays, completed a second, and am revising my first novel.
I've written personal essays examining issues of sexual and gender identity from childhood to adulthood as well as essays meditating on soap operas, Janis Joplin's apartment in San Francisco, fatherhood and childlessness, among other subjects. In my new collection, I’m wondering about the implications of having denied my truest self for so long and how sustained denial complicated the desire for romantic love, self-acceptance of body image, male friendship, and empowerment, to name a few. I'm also completing a novel based on an anecdote from family history. A road narrative, it depicts a small-town sheriff who brings his entire family along for a prisoner transport trip from Missouri to California and back. Broadly, it is a story about the thin lines between citizen and criminal, and privilege and misfortune, and it wonders why some unlawful acts are ignored while others are paid for seemingly out of scale.
My writing has been published in literary journals such as The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Ninth Letter, as well as selected for anthologies like The Best American Essays and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to present. I've received residency fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.