WORK

CUR-RENT PROJECTS

SIN

THE SIN BETWEEN US.

THE SIN BETWEEN US is a book about the killing of a gay man ––a hate-crime before it was legally designated as such––and its wake in a rural Midwest community. It is a book about transgression and violence; it is about a shared adolescence between the author and killer, and about how place shapes the state-of-mind of hate and how that shaping is normalized. The book attempts to apprehend how the experience of hate is made intimate in individual lives, and how a community––its institutions, its social, moral, and political geography––also becomes an actor in the story of violence. Said plainly, THE SIN BETWEEN US is a close look at what is happening in rural America today through the lens of hate––how it is sustained, buried, ignored, and especially, how it is felt––and the possibilities of repair.

GONE GONE.

THE SHAPE OF FUTURE WOUNDS.

GONE GONE attempts to reckon with grief in the face of overdose death and the many afterlives of loss created by the opioid crisis. Through different stories and voices, I test what it is to let the swirl of intensity guide the writing of loss I encountered in and around Montreal. What I hope results is a polyvocal record that resists the assumed sameness of this all-too-common form of death. GONE GONE is a book––essay, prose, poetry, ethnography––about the dense and complicated grief that follows fatal overdose. The book considers the way loss is folded back into the everyday, again and again. Out in March 2025 from Duke University Press.

THE SHAPE OF FUTURE WOUNDS is a book about the relationship of images to wounds and to wounding. It is a study of the representation of wounds in (mostly) contemporary art and an anthropological experiment in looking through symptom and injury. Under contract with McGill-Queen's University Press.

THIRTY THREE