I grew up in Tacoma, went to Tacoma Community College and the University of Puget Sound, got a PhD in American literature from Princeton, and dropped out of divinity school and taught writing at Yale. I’m now a professor of English at Queens College, CUNY, where I teach creative nonfiction in the MFA program.
My first book, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (Bloomsbury, 2019), is a collection of essays on love and friendship. It was a Kirkus Best Memoir of the Year and a CBC Best International Nonfiction Book of the Year and a Finalist for a Washington State Book Award. My second book, Gilead Reread, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
I am an editor at KtB Magazine and a contributing editor at the independent press And Other Stories. I also teach in the Yale Prison Education Initiative and Yale Summer Session.
My essays, reviews, op-eds, profiles, listicles, and sermons are published in Avidly, Beliefnet, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Chronicle Review, Columbia Journal, The Conversation, Crosscurrents, Curbed, Document Journal, HuffPost, The Independent, KtB Magazine, Longreads, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, The New Republic, Newsweek, New York Magazine/The Cut, Not Coming to a Theater Near You, The Paris Review, Public Books, Religion & Politics, The Revealer, Sacred Matters, The Seattle Star, The Stranger, The Syndicate, Talking Points Memo, the Washington Post, and The Yale Review.
I’ve also contributed chapters to The Pocket Instructor: Writing (Princeton University Press, forthcoming), The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Update Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic for a New Era (Harper Perennial, 2022), The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters (Broadleaf, 2021), A World Out of Reach: Dispatches from Life Under Lockdown (Yale University Press, 2020), Keywords for Southern Studies (University of Georgia Press, 2016), James Baldwin: America and Beyond (University of Michigan Press, 2011), and American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (University of Georgia Press, 2011).
I live in Elmhurst, Queens.