Photo Credit: Ye Fan
I’m a Contributing Editor and Reporter at Radiolab, the Peabody-award winning podcast from WNYC. I also write essays, criticism, and reported pieces for The Paris Review Daily, The Believer, Guernica, Topic, Longreads, The White Review, and others. A few of my favorites pieces of writing include this one about girls who love horses, this one about fly-fishing and gender, and this one about utopian jumpsuits.
My first book, Butts: A Backstory came out in November 2022. The New York Times called it a “carefully researched and reported work of cultural history” and The Washington Post declared it “entertaining and wise.” Butts was named a Best Book of the Year by Esquire, Time, and Publisher’s Weekly, and was one of Amazon’s Top 20 Books of the Year. You can read more about it and order it here.
I have an MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia University, where I now teach creative writing. I also founded the Incarcerated Writer’s Initiative at Columbia, and continue to serve as an advisor.
Before relocating to New York, I lived in Chicago for almost a decade, where I worked at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, wrote about social practice art and the history of Chicago, and lectured on Hull-House, Jane Addams, historic house museums, and innovative curatorial practice at historic sites.