This is where you can find my writing
in the wild!

““The sonic experience of Whitehead’s writing is part of its point, and I yearn to crawl into a cave that reverberates with his musicality. While reading, I wondered how my experience of the book would change if I could witness it performed by Whitehead: animated by breath and body, an incarnation for which the text cries out. But is that not another form of commodification? Would such enactment be the commandeering of Whitehead’s voice or the usurpation of my ears? In the dialectic between speaker and audience, what is the distribution of power?”

Review of Making Love with the Land, by Joshua Whitehead
Published in Full Stop

picture of the home screen of Lit Mag News: jars of coins with sprouts coming out of them, over a headline

“We have this weird idea in our society that if you love doing something, you shouldn’t even want to get paid for it – that the involvement of money sullies the pursuit, that the purity of your passion is tainted by the invocation of capital. It’s that old adage (misattributed to Mark Twain and Confucius, actual source unknown): “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Which is absolutely false! The presence of love does not eradicate the reality of labor. That’s an incredibly romantic idea that mostly allows people with capital to manipulate and avoid paying people with passion.”

What I Learned About Monetization by Launching a Lit Mag
Published in Lit Mag News

““The people living in darkness have seen a great light,” Pastor Rob quotes. Isaiah 9:2—a verse I’ve always loved. It suggests that whatever is incomprehensible or impenetrable will be illuminated; that we are not alone in our suffering. Solace and revelation: I crave them still. The single candle flame is passed down the pews, and the flame multiplies, lighting each wick to which it is touched, until the hexagonal hall is suffused with heavenly light. A thousand golden pinpricks shimmer and flicker in the darkness around us. We bask in the collective glow for a moment, cradled in its sinuous womb. The firelight warms my cheeks and travels down my throat to my chest. This is glory. How could I ever turn away?”

Essay: Christmas Eve at Calvary Bible
Published in For Page and Screen

Red book with navy blue writing, titled The Propagandist

“In The Propagandist, Desprairies challenges the reader to inhabit a morally fraught protagonist. Why would someone collaborate with Nazis? The novel asks. Who would do such a thing?”

Review of The Propagandist, by Cécile Desprairies, translated by Natasha Lehrer
Published in Full Stop

“The novel is committed to the multiplicity embedded in “no one way,” and it depicts a wide range of non-heteronormative relationship configurations. There are no straight white characters here. Fati, who works at TJ’s family’s bakery, “quit her father’s Sugar Land dentistry, married her live-in boyfriend, and immediately declared that she was only interested in polyamory.” Desire, clear communication, and respect are prioritized over adherence to any kind of traditional romantic model. The relationships portrayed are queer, open, closed, communicative, iterative, and multimodal. Plus there’s a whole lot of extemporaneous fucking.”

Book Review of Family Meal, by Bryan Washington
Published in Bridge Eight

Man in blue shirt stands alongside stainless steel invention

“On a brisk evening in March 2023, I watched entrepreneur Jim Sears inject Bisquick batter into a small spinning oven. The device, called SATED, is Jim’s invention: a way to cook hot food in zero-gravity environments.”

To Bisquick and Beyond: Interview with Boulder Entrepreneur, Jim Sears
Published in Boulder Magazine

Green in front of dead yellow grass

“Many of the ideas articulated in Low echoed the conversations I used to have with Jesse Lott and Rick Lowe at the domino table. When Johnson cites the artist Pope L., saying, “Marked by this trauma, I have a choice: either be ruled by circumstance or be circumstance and tap the energy of predicament,” I hear Brother Jesse: “One cannot be a victim of situations and circumstances while one is participating in the creative act”—a catchphrase followed by his signature thunderbolt laugh.”

Book Review of Low: Notes on Art & Trash, by Jaydra Johnson
Published in Full Stop

picture of woman's hands and man's hands holding a knife together to cut a white-and-yellow wedding cake

“Objective: The board game is a straight and narrow path from birth to marriage. To start the game, you will select a player identity (choose from Jessica, Lindsay, Hannah, or Bekah) and receive a fixed amount of Innocence Tokens. You can never gain more Innocence than you have at birth.”

Board Game Instructions for Purity—Race to the Altar
Published in Wit Tea at the Offing

Grayscale image of two rotting pears, underneath the words, "To Cut the Rot From the Fruit"

“Evangelicalism erupts year after year with scandal as another prominent preacher falls. These pastors, “men of God,” crumple in their roles and hurl collateral damage in every direction like a whirling dervish of pain, and still women are considered unfit to teach? Men dominate the system that taught me to override my own instincts and defer my authority.”

Essay: To Cut the Rot From the Fruit
Published in Belmont Story Review, volume 9

“One year, I wrapped myself in fleece and pinned on some knitted scraps and said I was a piece of yarn. The next year, I wore my gray sweatpants and sweatshirt inside out and claimed to be a nub of dryer lint. This was a family tendency, inherited from my father, who once duct-taped a bunch of multicolored cardboard bricks to his body and christened himself “Brick Man.””

Essay: the girl who dressed as a turd
Published at sneaker wave

“Search Histories is preoccupied with ways of achieving security in a precarious world, whether that security comes from stable family, romantic relationships, gainful employment or side hustle, celebrity or beauty.”

Book Review of Search Histories, by Caitlin Farrugia
Published by Full Stop

Cover of the book, The Weird Sister Collection, surrounded by illustrated jewels

“Rejecting the dominant culture’s way of being comes with grief—a grief that the contributors to Weird Sister know well. Resistance to dominant culture has to be nurtured like a timid houseplant. The Weird Sister Collection is one such way of tending to the anti-patriarchal imagination.”

Book Review of The Weird Sister Collection: Writing at the Intersections of Feminism, Literature, and Pop Culture
Published by Full Stop

“The book I ended up writing was in many ways a reaction to all the books I didn’t want to write, or was afraid to write, or was afraid to be perceived as writing. I didn’t want to write a narrative addiction memoir that was about redemption.”

Interview: Margo Steines
Published by Full Stop

“Heterosexuality and the family are two of the American sitcom’s overarching frameworks, and Lavery intends to see how the episodic nature of the sitcom destabilizes, reasserts, and propagates these values. . . “

Book Review of Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom, by Grace Lavery
Published by Full Stop

eight dead chickens lined up on the ground

“Maybe it’s that I lost the wonder, that the astonishment at the heart of faith was dulled by over-intellectualization and the slow sterilization of my community and my own disillusionment with evangelical exclusivity. Six years in Houston—during which, I fell in love. I married an atheist. Our union, the definitive strike of my noncompliance. A death knell for my long-standing desire for religious approval. But not the death of my desire for spirituality and sacrament.”

Essay: The Chicken Harvest
Published by Psaltery & Lyre

“For her to acknowledge the architected narrative in the final essays of Make It Scream, Make It Burn, but not acknowledge that she might be writing Splinters to convince herself of something, feels like a breach of trust…”

Book Review of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, by Leslie Jamison
Published by San Antonio Review

“The testimony becomes a way of refusing the world… The stakes are eliminated. Nothing else can happen to you. Everything is resolved. The story’s over.”

Essay: The Problem with the Evangelical Story Structure
Published at Write or Die magazine

“Dixon maintains deliberate and methodical prose. She eschews contractions and any grammatical flourish that would expedite her consideration of loneliness…”

Book Review of The Loneliness Files, by Athena Dixon
Published by Barrelhouse

“Brutalities is not a triumphant recovery memoir. To whatever extent “healing” happens, it occurs off the page. Steines refuses to characterize her past self as fallen, foolish, and wicked…”

Book Review of Brutalities: A Love Story, by Margo Steines
Published by Full Stop

“These stories capture the fatalism of growing up in a context where your only options are conformity or exile.”

Book review of Because We Were Christian Girls, by Virgie Townsend
Published by Colorado Review online

“The book enacts its own point: this is what it’s like to have your voice distorted by years of conditioning.”

Book Review of The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife, by Shannon Harris
Published by New Critique

“Being in Nanny’s house, trying on Nanny’s clothes and sorting her trinkets, surrounded by the trappings of motherhood, I thought about expectations and constraints, the way that women are shaped by our environments and sometimes dictated by them.”

“Expecting Bluebonnets,” personal essay
Published by Glasstire