BAE Notable

So excited to have my prize winning Redivider piece, "I'm Trying to Tell You I'm Sorry," included on the "Notable Essays" list in the forthcoming Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen this year!

“Or later how I’d tell another boy—the one whose parents hated me because I was in high school and he was twenty-two, still living at home, stinking up their certain kind of organized garage—to drop me off at the top of my street, nights when we’d been out doing stuff in empty corporate complex parking lots and in the wet grass. I’d wait for him to drive away and I’d walk to my neighbor’s house in the dark, this really beautiful guy, and scratch at his bedroom window. We’d smoke a little joint and my eyes would close and I’d let him do his thing.

This is how I did everything. A few in my pocket. My secret entourage.”

Check out my interview on The Nervous Breakdown with poet Eleni Sikelianos. We talk genre fluidity and the creative potential of hybrid memoir...

“In You Animal Machine, that picture of my grandmother in her leopard costume probably tells about 90% of the story. At some point, I realized I was trying to gather her up, as if she’d been dismembered by time and trauma, so I took that picture and chopped it up into parts and scattered them throughout the bookleopard girl, like weigh stations, stations of the cross, or lost oases in the desert, until we get to the final, full picture of her at the end of the book. In that picture, we can see her as hiding behind the mask, or as suited up (like a super hero). Either way, the image has the last “word” in the main body of the book. It took me a lot of language to scratch at the other 10% of the story. I’m not saying a picture is worth a thousand words. A picture can over-fix reality, we can get stuck in an image’s interpretation of the past; language is a way to mobilize it.”
— Eleni Sikelianos

Book Review: The World is On Fire by Joni Tevis

My review of Joni Tevis's latest essay collection, The World is On Fire: Scrap Treasure and Songs of Apocalypse

“‘There is a crease for grief in any day, but usually we turn away from it,’ Tevis writes. Perhaps it is this very act of not turning away, of staying curious and vulnerable, that saves her and in turn us. The World is On Fire masterfully questions, rummages, and connects the obscure with the universal, uncovering truths about faith and resurrection we had been waiting for, whether we knew it or not.”
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Beacon Street Prize

So pleased to have won the Beacon Street Prize for my piece "I'm Trying to You I'm Sorry," judged by the very awesome best-selling author Susannah Cahalan. Cahalan says: “The essay was poetic, haunting, disturbing, and powerful. The imagery, word play, and propulsive rhythm of language gripped me from the first paragraph to its gorgeous last sentence. This was a highly unusual and unforgettable essay.”

Blushing.