Portrait of the author

Photo: Mark Dellas

Writer, publisher, filmmaker.

I’m a writer from Buffalo, New York. My debut memoir, I Am Here You Are Not I Love You, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in spring 2025, and the accompanying short documentary film premiered at the Buffalo International Film Festival (BIFF) in October 2024. I’m interested in the people that shape places and places that shape people—and the people and places that have shaped me. I’m also a cofounder and publisher of Foundlings Press, senior editor at Traffic East, founder of Carrowduff Arts consultancy and production company, and Literary Curator at Artpark, where I oversee a residency for poets and writers. News and new work are below.

Latest

Each of us knows that someday we will lose one another. But in this moment, the world is changeless, the map is teeming, and nothing is lost.

To make an authorial leap into any Other is a high-stakes moral and aesthetic endeavor. To make the leap into a subject you love is heightened into an altogether different act, its violence arcing back.

Only after we are certain that we have finished a piece of writing can we know precisely what we have failed to say. Among other things, this failure points us to where we must begin writing again.

“A Hole at the Bottom of the Book” in Public Books

As an open atheist, the answer shouldn’t have mattered to me—but I wish he would have said, simply, “yes.”

“The Things We Choose” in Humanities Magazine

The Dug-Up Gun Museum is not an attempt to answer a question, to stay confusion, or even to bear witness, which means to attest to the truth of something. It merely aims to stun our conditioned apostrophe—an exercise in durational resistance to turning away.

Reviewing Matt Donovan’s The Dug-Up Gun Museum in Colorado Review

Time continues at its plastic pace. Experience, like language, accumulates. And love, like writing, tends to want another word.