Faculty

I have worked as critic and culture writer for thirty-five years, publishing in a wide variety of commercial magazines and literary journals. In such venues I often seek to bring lesser known artistic enterprises to wider notice. For instance, I have written essays about the French literary group Oulipo, Ray Johnson's letter art, Vivian Maier's photography, Sun Ra, Jackson Mac Low's drawings, Jack Whitten's sculptures, and a museum devoted to the ephemera of one man’s life. 

My poetry and fiction draw on a wide range of influences, including Charles Olson, Gertrude Stein, and Italo Calvino. While I advocate for writing that attempts, through stylistic innovation, to cast experience anew, my tastes are energetically catholic and extend both widely (across the arts) and deeply (from high to popular culture). I employ this range of aesthetic awareness to bring writing students toward a valuable insight: the interconnectedness of all art through common origins in the need to express consciousness.   

BA, English Literature, Pennsylvania State University

Same Faces (Black Square, 2020)

Games and Stunts (Black Square, 2017)

Touch Wood (Black Square, 2011)

Letters from Mayhem (Cabinet Books, 2004)

Me with Animal Towering (Black Square, 2002)

A Handbook of Phrenology, artist’s book (Dolphin Press, 2000)

The Geographics (Hard Press, 1995)

Bendable Siege (Red Dust, 1991)

Poetry, fiction, and prose has appeared in many magazines, anthologies, and editions: Bookforum, Black Clock, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Cabinet, First Intensities, The Germ, Grand Street, Hambone, Harper’s, Jubilat, Lihub, New Observations, New York Times Book Review, Open City, PEN America, Postmodern Culture, Salon, Talisman, Tin House, Seneca Review, Southhampton Review, Sulfur, The Village Voice. Brooklyn Rail: Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose, 2006); Cooking and Stealing: The Tin House Non-Fiction Reader (Bloomsbury, 2004); 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11th (NYU Press, 2002) ; The Best of the Village Voice Literary Supplement (Riverhead, 2001); All the Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader (Touchstone, 2002); The Wine Dark Sea by Leonardo Sciascia (Introduction) (New York Review Books, 2000); Gertrude Stein: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne, 1999); White Noise by Don DeLillo: Text and Criticism (Viking, 1998); Fetish: An Anthology (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998); Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Talisman, 1996).