Writing

Ditmas Be the Place

Essay, New York Review of Architecture #50, May 2026

A FEW DAYS BEFORE HALLOWEEN, a crumbling 5,870-square-foot single-family home was listed for $2.6 million in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ditmas Park. Realtor photos lit creepily by flashlight showed a grand staircase with carved balusters falling out like teeth, a wood-paneled parlor flanked by an ornate fireplace, and a taxidermy Canada goose frozen midflight above a trove of antiques on the floor of a forgotten library. The New York Post called the six-bedroom, one-bathroom Colonial Revival, formerly owned by a Mr. and Mrs. George Van Ness, “one of Brooklyn’s few surviving Victorian-era homes” and lamented its “tragic” state of disrepair. A March New York Times feature cast the “once-majestic mansion” at 1000 Ocean Avenue as “a temple of profligate neglect” with a “murky” past and “even murkier” future. To the locals quoted in the article, the house’s deterioration was “an absolute tragedy”—and just plain spooky. Read more at the New York Review of Architecture.

A Tree Grew in Brooklyn

Essay, Virginia Quarterly Review, Centennial Issue, July 2025

In the late summer, I became obsessed with a particular tree. I was pushing my daughter’s stroller toward the library on Argyle Road when I saw it. The gray limbs were pale in the distance, the trunk goliath. Dust and pollen hung in the dappled light of its canopy. I had recently moved to Ditmas Park, a picturesque and gentrified pocket of Brooklyn where the gray unfurling cedes to rows of candy-box Victorians with historical markers. Read more at the Virginia Quarterly Review.

How to break a Sentence

Essay, The Rumpus, Parallel Practice, February 2025

I was at the kitchen table with my four-year-old when I had the idea to represent a sentence through embroidery. I’d been reading Renée Gladman and looking at her Prose Architectures, a book of pen drawings that Gladman intended, as I read on the publisher’s website, “to free language from constraint.” The drawings arc and scribble but never fall into the shapes of letters or words. They evoke city skylines more than sentences, and yet they depict movement. They do the work of containing something. Gladman called them “an inner syntax worth seeing” and “maps or diagrams of the way the mind goes.” The drawings are writing without the imposed logic of grammar. After I saw Gladman’s sentence drawings, I became obsessed with what they held—the sweeping plunge forwards into meaning, unbound by signifiers or their limitations. I wanted to embroider sentences that depicted the gesture of meaning-making without leaning on text. I didn’t want to stitch letters—I wanted abstract shapes and textures that would reach toward meaning or at least suggest it. Read more at The Rumpus.

Criticism

Asymptote, “What’s New In Translation Column,” January 2026

Los Angeles Review of Books - “This Book Is About Me,” 2024

Los Angeles Review of Books - “An Ethical Matryoshka: On Daniela Petrova’s ‘Her Daughter’s Mother’,” 2019

Los Angeles Review of Books - “The Bitchified Decade We’re Still Paying For,” 2018

The Brooklyn Rail - “Two New Anthologies Look Beyond Body Positivity and Sexism,” 2018 (and in print)

Los Angeles Review of Books - “A Recipe for Coping in Trump’s America,” 2017

Conversations

CRAFT - “Interview: Shayne Terry,” 2025

Publishers Weekly - “The Business of Eating: PW Talks with Ed Levine,” 2019 (and in print)

Publishers Weekly - “In Search of Flavor: PW Talks with Jeff Gordinier,” 2019 (and in print)

Publishers Weekly - “Remembering ‘Gourmet’: PW Talks with Ruth Reichl,” 2019 (and in print)

Electric Literature - “A Memoir Offers a New Look at How America Fails the Mentally Ill,” 2018