Advance preview reading from a forthcoming artist monograph pairing original lyric poetry with Bryce Canyon landscape photography. Explores the tactile tension between book design, verse cadence, and deep geologic time ahead of the volume’s December publication via Riparia.US.
Selected by the American Playwriting Foundation as an Honorable Mention among 2,200 submissions for the 2026 Relentless Award, recognizing the full-length stage play A Tornado, a Turnip, and a Minotaur Walk into a Bar (adapted from the hybrid memoir of the same name).
"Gen Z Can’t Escape AI. It Has to Learn How to Master It" → — By-lined column on labor fatalism, generative systems, and technical mastery.
"Formulating Forensic Persistence: David Carroll Orr Tracks Historical Ledger Systems" → — Tracing systemic memory and structural persistence in antebellum legal records.
"How 19th-Century Jurisprudence Shapes Modern Algorithms" → — Archival investigation linking frontier civil order to algorithmic governance.
A juried selection for the Chicago Dramatists Network PlayFest, this short historical drama dramatizes the final hour before a frontier jailhouse murder in 1830s Arkansas Territory. Directed by Adrianne Cury at the Russ Tutterow Theater, Chicago, IL.
Following an FY26 Creative Accelerator Grant ($10,000), this back-to-back IAC support fuels an interdisciplinary project spanning visual art, artist’s books, and dramatic scripts through a cross-fertilizing experimental process.
This exploration activates HD acrylic on metallic prints as a nascent medium—a technical framework deployed to capture and interpret the spatial essence of anticipation.
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In August 1963, at eleven years old, I boarded a segregated intercity bus on my first solo trip and struck up an immediate alliance with a boy named Theseus.
What began as an unformed childhood effort to understand fear soon found ordinary realism inadequate. To confront the fading architectures of the Jim Crow South alongside buried family trauma—including my mother’s wartime affair with author James Agee—the narrative breaks its realistic container. It leaps into the absurd: masquerading deities, high-orbit purgatories, and 1960s pop mythologies become the structural mechanisms needed to navigate grief and race.
Constructed across twenty-seven chapters, ten visual plates, and thirty-three interleaved lyric poems, the book balances experimental fragmentation against a durable narrative spine.
“A tapestry of beguiling complexity, weaving the familiar into something breathtakingly new. The threads of language ignite passion, revealing raw power and meaning in a singular, potent way. This challenges and touches hidden spaces, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, making you believe the impossible.”
“The deeper you delve, the greater the rewards. Beautifully crafted, this story touches your heart, revealing hidden truths. It is a journey beyond crude ideas, where human limitations meet boundless potential. Chaos, darkness, and beauty blend, offering a poignant and authentic experience.”
“‘Challenges hidden spaces,’ ‘touches your heart’... It did make me think. Primarily about whether defrosting a woolly mammoth takes longer before or after you’ve fully contemplated the inevitable heat death of the universe. Seems like one eternal problem should inform the other, you know? But frankly, neither feels particularly solvable right now. Guess it’s all just... background noise to the pouring, eh? More wine?”
MFA Thesis on the structural mechanics developed for this volume: Tornado Turnip Minotaur • School of the Art Institute of Chicago, John M. Flaxman Library (April 2025).
This critical inquiry argues for the efficacy of a "handrail" strategy in navigating experimental fiction, taking the author’s hybrid text A Tornado, a Turnip, and a Minotaur Walk into a Bar: An American Memoir as its primary case study. Completed in April 2025, the 105,000-word work addresses an essential challenge facing contemporary hybrid literature: how to innovate formal storytelling without losing readers accustomed to traditional narrative arcs. Even as text fractures into absurdist scenes and non-linear chronologies, a deliberate architecture of familiar story vectors—rising action, crisis, resolution, and clear character intent—serves as an orienting handrail.
Rather than merely offering comforting conventions, these familiar elements actively reframe the fragmented passages, steering interpretive focus toward deeper themes of fear, systemic racism, and ancestral memory. The critical framework synthesizes methodologies across reader-response theory, post-structuralism, literary allusion, recurring motif analysis, and Black studies to demonstrate how formal anchors empower both novice and sophisticated readers to engage with challenging, multifaceted texts.
Formal assessment from the Low-Residency MFA Faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on the successful execution of the hybrid narrative architecture.
Print-to-Stage Adaptation
Complete physical edition specifications, Chapter I in its entirety, interleaved lyric verse specimens, and full-color museum plates are available in the interactive reader at the imprint:
