Hello, friends.
I’m a writer. In my quest to be able to say that, I held many jobs, lived other lives. I sold cemetery plots in Houston, Texas (not very well). I packed parts in a machine shop. And I was a park ranger in South Carolina, Georgia, and Oregon, where I dressed up as J.R. Beaver on Friday afternoons, inadvertently scaring small children. I did my graduate work in creative writing at the University of Houston, and I began teaching there. After that, I taught at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities as the Edelstein-Keller Discovery Fellow, and at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as the Kenan Visiting Writer. Now I teach at Furman University, in Greenville, South Carolina, where I serve as the Bennette E. Geer Professor of English.
My latest essay collection, The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse, was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. My debut collection, The Wet Collection: A Field Guide to Iridescence and Memory, was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. Two of my essays have won Pushcart Prizes: “If Your Dreams Don’t Scare You,” about hazing, music, and marching band; and “What the Body Knows,” about rafting the Canning River in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. My essays have been published in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Orion, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. In 2020, I received an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.