Ephemera
Selected essays appearing elsewhere (click to read where applicable):
“In the City of Lions,” Arrowsmith, vol. 33, January 2026.
“Missing Confucius,” Virginia Water Magazine, July/August 2021.
“Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain: Notes on Narrator, Persona, Voice,” in Come On In: A Chapbook of Lectures on the Craft of Creative Writing, Welcome Table Press and WV Wesleyan MFA in Creative Writing, 2017.
“Memorial Daze (It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry),” Aster(ix): What We Love, Fall 2016
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Success,” Welcome Table Press Occasional Papers on Practice & Form, 2013.
“Strangers on a Plane,” The Normal School, 2013
“Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone: A Letter to James Baldwin on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of His Passing,” Hunger Mountain, December 2012
“A Theory of Almost,” The Diagram, 2012
“Attraction Next Exit,” River Teeth, Fall 2011
“h/experiment,” Redefining the Experiment, Welcome Table Press, 2011
“An Essayist's Dilemma,” The Essayist's Dilemma, Welcome Table Press, 2011
“An Occurrence at Avignon,” The Normal School, 2010
“Small Love Letters,” Brevity, September 2010
“An Exercise in Artifice: On Writing “See Me Slant,” Fourth Genre, 2009
“Eight”, Nightsun, 2007
“You Can't Get Anything Past a Cow,” Brevity, 2007
"Rhinos in the Museum" (a forty-nine-second microvideoessay).
Appearing in anthologies:
“What’s Past Is Prologue,” foreword to The Best American Essays 2025, October 2025.
“For the Sake of Argument,” foreword to The Best American Essays 2024, October 2024.
“Lilacs at Auschwitz,” in Deep Beauty: Experiencing Wonder When the World Is On Fire, edited by Rosemary Winslow and Catherine Lee (Norwalk, CT: Woodhall Press, 2020).
"71 Fragments for a Chronology of Possibility" and "An Eight-Paragraph, Five-Fragment Essay on Writing 71 Fragments," in Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction, edited by B. J. Hollars (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).
“Of Miracles, Nested Dolls, and the Unlimited,” ISLE, 2006; reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, 2012.
“Of Borders, Infidels, and the Ethic of Love,” reprinted in An Ethical Compass: Coming of Age in the 21st Century, edited by Elie Wiesel (Yale University Press, 2010).