News item #1: A new short story of mine is published in the April issue of Harper’smagazine. It’s called “Trying to Find the Right and True Way to Talk about Death Is Funny.” It’s about death, philosophy, and saying good-bye. I’m grateful to editors Christine Smallwood and Chris Carroll for taking a chance on it. Please check it out!
News item #2: I’m honored to be a recipient of one of this year’s Arts and Letters Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Two new poems of mine, “Sequence” and “Open Ticket,” are published in the spring/summer 2025 issue of the literary journal Subtropics. Please subscribe here! (A decade ago, Subtropics published one of my earliest stories, “The Usual Labyrinth,” so the journal and I have a history.)
The two new poems are pretty different in style. “Sequence” is dense and muddy, at least for me. The origin-story is that I wrote it after I dropped a window sash on my right index finger, got four stitches, and took a picture of the wound every day for a month. It’s about the deep weirdness of watching one’s skin grow back together scarred.
The content of “Open Ticket” is a little dark, too, but in a light-verse way. There’s a simple what-if, the ramifications of which I then methodically pursue, in rhyming quatrains.
