I can say this without spoiling anything, but the epilogue to Becoming Little Shell begins with reflections from “a little green house high on a hillside that overlooks Butte, Montana.” It is mid-November of 2021 and, as I wrote, I was in that house enjoying a residency where I largely completed the first draft of …
Tupac Shakur’s poetry collection, The Rose that Grew from Concrete, and the safety of a diary were my entries into becoming a writer. For the entirety of middle school and the first half of high school, I was the kid who came into class late while cracking jokes or quips and sat in the back …
By the time he was twenty-nine, Charles Darwin had puzzled his way toward two-thirds of his theory of natural selection. He understood that plants and animals passed traits (hair color, say, or beak shape, or flower scent) down to their offspring. And he understood that those traits were not passed down perfectly. We resemble our …
Unfollow Me: Essays on Complicity is a memoir in essays about identity, hierarchy, and the illusion of being right. It is a book about a hard fall from a high horse, the trouble with attempting to hear yourself in an echo chamber, and the pursuit of honesty over agreement. It is a book intended to …
What Strange Paradise is a short, quiet book. It’s about a boy who washes up on an unnamed Western island, the sole survivor of a migrant shipwreck, and about his life before and after that moment. More than that, it’s about home, that word the novelist Naguib Mahfouz once defined as not the place you …
