Hi! I’m an art critic, author of two books, The Way Things Go (punctum books, 2023) and Exercises in Criticism (Dalkey Archive, 2015), and Professor of English at Hostos Community College, CUNY. Before joining Hostos, I was a Language Lecturer in NYU’s Expository Writing Program and before that an Adjunct Lecturer in the CUNY system and a professional online poker player.
A lot of my art writing focuses on artists who address climate change and ecology. I continue to write about such work but have branched out in other directions as well, with a particular interest in artist-run spaces. I’ve contributed features, reviews, and interviews about contemporary art to magazines such as Frieze, Hyperallergic, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, New York Review of Architecture, The Art Newspaper, and Art in America. When I was writing more regularly about books, I contributed to places such as Bookforum, The Believer, LARB, and Boston Review.
My most recent book, The Way Things Go, contains a mix of poetry, art writing, and life writing about anticipatory grief, or mourning someone or something before it’s gone. Each successive chapter in the book decreases in length by exactly one sentence (a book-length Oulipian “melting snowball”), from a 71 sentence-long opening chapter, to a 70 sentence second chapter, to 69 sentences, 68 sentences, and so on down to 1.
My first book, Exercises in Criticism, uses various procedures (a chapter written entirely in interrogatives; a recorded and edited transcription of my Ph.D. dissertation defense) to write poetic and autobiographical criticism about OuLiPo’s English-language legacy. It was named to Entropy Magazine’s “Best of 2015: Non-Fiction” list.