Prodigal: Essays confronts the pervasiveness and harm of Southern silences, particularly those surrounding disability, queerness, gender, violence, and addiction. This voice-driven memoir-in-essays mixes interviews, history, and memory as I explore my own relationship with the South from afar. Prodigal asks and seeks to answer: What happens when so much remains unsaid? And, more importantly, how do I begin to break that silence?
Worthy Animal is a collection of poems that challenges how we engage with memory, the engines of our nostalgia. Rising from the shadow of Appalachia amid the ongoing opioid crisis, this collection centers on a speaker in recovery as they face what feels like a new world—their perceptions reshaped by a unique kind of witnessing, and what they find, on the other side of addiction, undeniable. Snaking through the various geographies of the Carolinas, this collection seeks to at once complicate, revive, and lay bare the human landscape of a place too often reduced to its clichés, or worse—its vices.
I'm currently open to solicitations, especially for poetry or essays. To query and/or solicit work, send me a note via my Contact page.