i eat the whole pepper.

I'm an award winning author, journalist, art historian, radio host, filmmaker, public talker, plant-based Neapolitan pizza expert, cocktail aficionado, hyper-competitive amateur bowler, social media skeptic, degrowth proponent, animal protector, and enthusiastic advocate for bucket hats. Big news: My autobiographical story The Vacantlands won Boulevard Magazine's latest Non-Fiction Award for Emerging Writers. It'll be in print sometime in 2025. I'll organize a reading tour once that happens, so stay tuned! If you want to read something in the meantime, other words I've written have been published in Western Humanities Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Space Squid, Swamp Ape Review, Tikkun, Hyperallergic, Grey Sparrow Journal, The Big Windows Review, and dozens of other magazines, newspapers, books, and artist monographs. My living history interviews with AFRICOBRA co-founder Gerald Williams and artist Carl Pope are part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, or you could listen to one of the radio shows I've created and hosted for WQRT, an experimental art, music, and community radio project by Big Car Collaborative, such as the acclaimed, pandemic-inspired series Apocalypse Mixtape, or the music-centered, artist interview series Art Racket. I hold a degree in filmmaking from Vancouver Film School, degrees in Theater and Photojournalism from Ball State University, and a 2nd degree black belt from a little karate school in Indianapolis. I live part time in a little brick house with a vegetable garden and garage dojo in Muncie, Indiana, and part time in a historic condo in Evanston, Illinois, where there's a lovely courtyard in which we neighbors gather to chat and let our dogs rub noses.