I live in Brooklyn, New York with my wife, two daughters, and Chihuahua. In the past few months I’ve seen my essays published in Atlas and Alice, The Weeklings, The Normal School, The Austin Review, and Essay Daily, with work forthcoming in New Madrid Journal of Contemporary Literature as well as an international anthology of microfiction. I also continue to serve as Online Editor for Hunger Mountain Journal for the Arts, and I write as "Dad for All Seasons" for A Child Grows in Brooklyn and other parenting publications.
The nonfiction genres in which I generally work are personal essay and memoir, though I also have written poetry, criticism, fiction, and just about everything in the space between them. I’ve dubbed my work Digital Nonfiction, based not just on the fact that much of it has been published online but also on what I consider its key aesthetic principles. My primary motive as a writer is to capture time, which is essentially analog, break it into workable narrative bits, and organize those bits into a digital circuit, which I call the essay. I got this idea from a fortune cookie that read, “Digital circuits are made from analog parts,” and have expounded on it in my critical essay “The Answer I Found in a Fortune Cookie: Toward a Digital Conception of Nonfiction,” published in Numero Cinq. Over the final four months of 2013 I also published my own digital list-essay, “The List and the Story,” one mini-essay a day, which garnered positive reviews, including Patrick Madden in Brevity Magazine calling the project “an interesting challenge to our default narrative and structural expectations while essaying a life through its interactions and influences.”
Two major developments have given especial focus to my most recent work. The first has been ever-increasing exposure and community for my continuous list-essay experiment “The List and the Story.” I presented a critical background to the project in October 2014 at the VIII Congreso Internacional de Minificción run by the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky, where I discovered, despite my limited proficiency with the Spanish language, a deep and long literary tradition for the work I’m doing with this project. I also contributed a mini-essay to the Satellite Collective’s Telephone project, “an innovative, online exhibition platform that will allow visitors to follow the trajectory of the message as it evolves through a multitude of art forms,” including “315 original works of music, collage, dance, print, film, installation, prose, sculpture, poetry, photography, embroidery, painting, drawing, performance, and even a videogame.” The exhibition launched on April 20, 2015, with a release party at the Bowery Poetry Club.
The other development is more solitary. After spending much of the year tooling and retooling my published essays into a workable book-length manuscript, I’m now knee-deep in submitting my book ms to agents and publishers. I’m very excited to have this book-length piece of myself ready to give over to the world, though I still haven’t decided between 4-5 working titles.