About me

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I was born in Texas and I’ve lived in Austin for the last twenty or so years. I am a senior lecturer at Texas State University, where I teach literature and creative writing. In the past I’ve worked as a bartender, a barista, airport ground crew for FedEx, a delivery driver for a bakery, a warehouse assistant for a birthday party supply company, and a longshoreman.

My short fiction and novellas have appeared in Pank, West Branch, The Seattle Review, Big Fiction, Meridian, and online at The Adroit Journal and Tin House. My essays have been published by Southern Humanities Review, The Missouri Review, and online at The Millions. To find links to my work, visit the Read Something page of this site.

Some of my favorite writers are Valeria Luiselli, Ben Lerner, Amelia Gray, Etgar Keret, Joan Didion, Alejandro Zambra, Tim O’Brien, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Haruki Murakami, and Franz Kafka. I also maintain a scholarly side hustle writing about Kurt Vonnegut.

I am a founding editor of the multilingual and transnational literary annual, Embarcadero.

Curriculum Vitae

Recent Appearances

Panel: Space Is the Place: Literary Spatialities and New Approaches to Placemaking
Organizer and Presenter, AWP 2020, San Antonio, Texas
With Ito Romo, Syed Ali Haider, and D.J. Lee

Reading: Excerpt from What Is a Beach?: Family History, Erasure, and Littoral Spatialities
Presenter, MLA International Symposium 2019, Lisbon, Portugal
Chair: Iona Luca; Discussant: Tatiana Kuzmic

Paper: “Kurt Vonnegut and Carl Sagan: A Tale of Two Assholes”
Presenter, American Literature Association 2018, San Francisco, California

Short Story Reading: “Angle & Distance”
Panelist, Northeast Modern Language Association 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania