Hi! I’m an art writer, author of two books, The Way Things Go (punctum books, 2023) and Exercises in Criticism (Dalkey Archive, 2015), and Associate 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 part-time professional poker player.
My art writing focuses on climate change and ecology. I’m interested in eco artistic practices that flourish outside the commercial mainstream, as well as ones that explore the experiential and psychological binds of the climate crisis. I’ve contributed reviews, interviews, and features to magazines such as Hyperallergic, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art in America.
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 rules and procedures to write poetic and autobiographical criticism about literary constraint. It was named to Entropy Magazine’s “Best of 2015: Non-Fiction” list and The Brooklyn Rail described it as being “of great interest to current or recovering grad students.” I wrote the book for my Ph.D. in English at the CUNY Graduate Center at a time when I still imagined that I might be an academic writer.
I’ve given readings and talks at colleges including University of Pennsylvania, California College of the Arts, University of Virginia, James Madison University, Sarah Lawrence College, Stevens Institute of Technology, and University of Calgary, and have acted as a visiting critic at various art programs and organizations. At Hostos, I ran a poetry reading series from 2015 – 2020 that brought to campus Adjua Greaves, Rachel Levitsky, Omotara James, Chloë Bass, Lo Kwa Mei-en, Anna Gurton Wachter, Ekere Tallie, and Lara Mimosa Montes.