About Me

Hi there. I’m a writer and editor and I live in Philadelphia, which is where I’m from. I write about grief, love, books, cats, material culture, language and meaning, queer stuff, and the chance meetings and small domestic details that make up my life. I spend the rest of my time doing Consonant Collective things with Joseph Carlough, my partner in life and other creative projects. That’s the short description.

Here’s the longer one

I studied linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, and after I got my degree I started working in arts journalism. I got a job writing for Philadelphia Weekly, where my column The Dubliner, a chronicle of a year I spent living in Ireland, was recognized for excellence in column writing by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. For several years after that I was a regular contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, mainly as a book critic but also as a reporter. For my biweekly column I looked at new ideas like interactive novels, computer-generated poetry, and other places where traditional storytelling and new technologies intersect. 

Since that time I have published personal and critical essays in many publications, including: Utne Reader, Adbusters, Philadelphia Magazine, Rain Taxi, The Millions, Men’s Health, The Comics Journal, The Believer Logger, and others.

I am also a longtime zine maker and a great believer in the power of this kind of self-publishing. I found the punk community back in 2004 after I made my first zine, a collection of poems called “Word Math,” and brought it to the Philly Zine Fest. I met people there who were interested in my work, and equally interested in sharing theirs with me; a true connection was made, and for the first time I felt that my solitary pursuits had led me to a place of belonging.

Through my involvement with zines I eventually met the good people at Microcosm Publishing, who have now published four of my books: a memoir called White Elephants; a collection of essays called Slip of the Tongue; Cats I’ve Known, an illustrated collection of stories about cats; and The Kitchen Witch, a guide to natural living for the spiritually inclined, which I co-wrote with my magical friend Nadine Schneider.

I used to have a horror of public speaking but I kept on doing it anyway, and now I sometimes even enjoy it! I’m proud to have given readings or talks at Ladyfest Philly, the Portland Book Festival, the Radar Reading Series in San Francisco, the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, the public radio station WXPN, and a great many DIY spaces.

I sometimes write poems, too. Years ago my poem “Kaiho” was published as a beautiful, tiny Poems-for-All book. More recently, in 2023, pages of my blackout poetry series, Softening is an invitation just to look, were featured in a solo show at DobraVaga Gallery in Ljubljana. And for the book My Red Couch (Wipf and Stock), an anthology that was concerned with its authors’ struggles to reconcile spirituality with feminism, I wrote about making found poetry, which I consider a way of listening to—and answering—the universe.

Thanks for visiting.