PUBLICATIONS & AWARDS

Notable & Recent

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Excerpts from "An Accurate Record"

Copytext, December 2025

Excerpts from early & final drafts of short story, published in Copytext, December 2025.

He listened to a studio audience clap in sympathy as a man on television wept, and he realized there was a reason he did not typically remember his dreams: Forgetting was an act of will. But it exhausted him. He couldn’t do it anymore.

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The Line

The Lemonwood Quarterly, Summer 2025

Short story, published in The Lemonwood Quarterly, August 2025.

Gayle imagined the lights of the plant going out section by section. How dark it would be in the depths of that building where not even the vague daylight that filtered through safety glass windows would reach. The silence when the buzz and hum of the machines cut out and every last fan stopped spinning.

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Lazarus Man

Stereo Stories, May 2024

Creative nonfiction about Terry Callier's song "Lazarus Man," published in Stereo Stories, May 2024.

But now I was almost nine years at the plant, and that novel was in a box in the closet, kept company by two others I’d gone on to write. The plant had become quicksand. I’d begun to understand how it could be easier to let it pull me under rather than waste energy thrashing about to try and escape. Just the same, I was trying.

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Diedrick Dodge

Story, Issue 11, Summer 2021

Short story, published in Story, September 2021.

***Story Foundation Prize Finalist.***

Miles finds himself one morning in a car dealership conference room presided over by a stocky, severe-eyed, sharp-dressed sales trainer who pours a voice of molten contempt over him and his fellow applicants as they quiver like terrified schoolkids. Among the first lessons Miles learns is that customs outside the plant are simply different.

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A Travelogue for the Wasteland (excerpt)

Novel Slices, Issue One

Excerpt of unpublished novel, published in Novel Slices, November 2020

**Winner in Novel Slices' 2020 Novel Excerpt Contest.**

***Nominated for a Pushcart Prize.***

As the day wore on, the mood spiraled sickeningly from expectancy to desperation, and it would eventually give way to devastation, but before it got to that point they took their praise and worship outside. They sang in what increasingly sounded like despondency and anguish, they stretched their arms to the sky, some of them leapt in place as if trying to spring-load themselves or get a head start. As early evening loomed, the crowd began to thin. Every now and then, from the distance, a car engine would interrupt and people would suddenly pray louder as if to drown it out.

Flyleaf Books

Bookshop.org

Amazon

Bell

Chautauqua, 2018: Wild & Tame

Short story, published in Chautauqua, July 2018

**Winner of the 2018 Chautauqua Editors Prize.**

Violence kept finding him. He was drawn somehow to it, or it was drawn to him. The weapons he carried. The jobs he undertook with the knowledge that he might have to use violence to fight violence, and therefore violence would look for him.

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Notes from Lazarus

The Bellingham Review, Issue 72

Short story, published in The Bellingham Review, 2016.

**Winner of the 2015 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction.**

***Nominated for a Pushcart Prize.***

Brooks ordered us another round. He reached back and took an envelope out of his jacket. Nicotine-yellow fingers opened the flap with reverence, carefully pulled out two photographs: attractive middle-aged woman, long black hair tinged with silver, graceful lines around a sensuous smile, bright green eyes. I'd never met her. Brooks seemed poised to say something, but then he shook his head, and we just looked at the photos together. Then he made a sound with his throat. "Once you care deeply for someone, it never stops," he said. "Never."

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