Selected Work

  • Six green parakeets perched on and flying around a tall tree trunk, set against a light, gradient sky.

    Compatible with Birds

    Finalist for 2025 Tennessee Williams Fiction Prize

    These parrots. The flock flies overhead, squawking, cackling. Merce sponges a wine goblet, soap suds inside and out. For a splinter of time her mother is not dead. Merce thinks, I must tell her, then remembers. She’s not here. Not anywhere. Ava’s ashes thrown toward the ocean but picked up by the wind. The wild parrots go west in the morning, east in the late afternoon, screeching across this corner of Los Angeles. Screeching. Shrieking.

    TWFest

  • Disfigured: An Essay

    Best Emerging Writers 2024

    The dog seemed old from the time we got him, as if he was acting the part of an elderly man. At the shelter, they said probably two. The vet said likely four. This makes him, now, either sixteen or eighteen. He’s nearly blind and mostly deaf.

    The Masters Review
  • Cover of a photo album titled 'Snapshots' featuring a collage of black and white photographs including people, animals, and objects.

    How to Safely Transport Your Wurlitzer

    Cordelia was in your apartment below, yowling, yowling. I’d dragged her cross-country to the sixth-floor walk-up in Little Italy, a shower in the kitchen. Access to the rooftop just outside your door. The sunset, that night, was cotton candy. We kept looking and looking away, forgetting, then looking again as it deepened to the inside of a fig...

    Snapshots: An Album of Essay and Image
  • Black and white photo of a person holding a vintage steering wheel inside an old car, with a large speedometer and dashboard visible.

    What She Is

    Long white-blonde hair in front of the white clapboard chapel. Her body almost invisible in the afternoon sun except for tan  legs, bare feet, the straps of sandals held in one hand like an invitation. A small valise at her feet, weathered, blue, hardly big enough for a change of clothing. He noticed her before he saw her thumb, out of place the way she was in front of Phillips Chapel.

    Colorado Review
  • A woman and a dog standing behind a metal fence at night, with the woman smiling and the dog reaching out towards the camera.

    What She Is Not

    You stood with the fat girls on the corner of Leavenworth and O’Farrell. Junkies nodded down on Eddy, and boys posed on Polk. You weren’t fat, but you were a freak, and the fat girls let you stand with them because no one else would.

    Waxwing Literary Journal
  • A small black and white dog sitting on a wooden deck outside a glass door with an open screen door, overlooking a garden with trees and foliage.

    Sentries

    When I wake, my right leg sheathed, I pull on wide-leg sweats that fit over the bandages wrapped from toe to thigh, and then I carry Bowie downstairs. He is long and low and old, nearly blind, one misstep away from a broken back. My own back catches when I pick him up; I’ve been told that I shouldn’t lift anything heavy, that it compresses my already compressed vertebrae. But I do it anyway.

    Bellevue Literary Review

Plays

  • A chalkboard filled with various complex mathematical equations and formulas written in white chalk.

    Number of People

    Production: Piven Theatre

    Workshops: Hartford Stage, Pasadena Playhouse, Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey

    LEO: It’s not just the numbers. I speak of numbers, yes. And the numbers, they make sense of the senseless. But, how can I explain? Every number means much more than a number. Every number is a face, a voice, a life. Not just a life, but a connection to an infinite number of lives. Every statistic is an address lived at, a chair sat in. You. Do you think of yourself as a statistic? Of course not! And there is proof that you are more. There are photographs and diaries. Books you’ve read. Someone must bear witness. Someone must tell the story.

  • Sovereign Body

    Finalist: 2011 Smith Prize

    Productions: The Road Theatre, Winding Road Theatre

    Workshops: Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, The Elephant Theatre

    EVIE: You wouldn’t even leave your bed. You’d just call out, “Mom!” until she woke up and then you’d be like, “Monster! There’s a monster!”

    CALLIE: I don’t remember that.

    ANNA: Maybe there are monsters.

    THE MAN: Maybe there are.

  • A woman is holding a young woman's face gently with her left hand, both facing each other in a dark setting with soft lighting, creating an intimate moment.

    And Let the Skies Fall

    Production: El Portal Theatre

    HITCHENS: This can be achieved in a number of ways: hands placed over your face to cover your mouth or nose, or a pillow, a plastic bag, gag, or other obstruction forced into your mouth, a handful of pebbles, dirt, dust or any foreign material to block your air passage shall create the desired effect. You will be dead in a matter of minutes. They say that water boarding simulates the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or rather, being drowned.

  • Shadows of metal bars cast on a stone floor in black and white.

    Trace (fka Habeas Corpus)

    Workshop: Boston Court

    WARDEN: Ain’t got time for that kinda bet. Some of these men, they’ll outlive me. No. Used to be how long they’d last in the chair. Then, for a while, it was the chamber. Now the table. Some of them go quick. Not the ones you expect. Others hang on. Lightning bolts going through them and they still alive.

    HANNAH: That was before.

     WARDEN: Right you is. We don’t electrify them no more. Not in this state. We don’t bet on them no more neither. I don’t. Bet on a man’s life. Can’t collect on that money, not in good conscience. Served a different purpose. The betting. Kept me. Apart. From them.