Essays, Reviews, + Other Non-fiction

What to Read When You Want to Destabilize the Binaries Between Good and Bad - The Rumpus, 2025

Excerpt:

“I’ve always been interested in “doing good,” an interest buoyed by early education in secular humanistic Jewish community that emphasized Tikkun Olam (leaving the world better than you found it) and Tzedakah (a bit harder to define, but a general commitment to “justice” or “righteousness,” often oversimplified to “charity”). In elementary school, this interest was harmless, if not particularly effective (making Valentine’s Day baggies for hospitalized children, cutting my hair for Locks for Love). I found, though, as I moved beyond the “cute” stage, that “just” and “righteous” are not objective qualities, and further, that my intersecting identities as a white person with access to generational wealth, education, and healthcare, necessarily forged a very particular idea of what “righteous” meant. I grew dubious of language about “philanthropy” and “helping,” while remaining stuck in a mind-loop demanding my perfection (what is that?) at performing these qualities.

When I entered prison as a creative writing workshop facilitator for the first time in my early 20s, this dubiousness became both more prescient and important. Extensive education in the work of radical thinkers and activists including Augustus Boal, Frantz Fanon, and Paulo Freire (among many others), alongside my sojourns to prison, opened up a world that allowed for me to question this “good/bad” binary with which I’d been obsessed, as I weekly entered a space I was told was for “bad people,” and yet my experiences did not match this warning. Later, a relationship with an incarcerated person further troubled my assuredness concerning what is “good,” “just,” “righteous.” I was thusly confronted with an option: double down on my binary thinking, or endeavor a journey in deconstructing how I’d been conditioned to think and behave. I chose, and try to continue to choose, the latter, and understand this is a lifelong commitment to living and thinking and writing and loving in—forgive me—the gray area…”

If and Abolition - The Adroit Journal, 2025

Excerpt:

“My education in abolitionist and liberatory theory and praxis was slow, such that I was waist-deep before even noticing it was an education upon which I was embarking. I’d had early introductions to “social-justice” framed thought and action, particularly through my secular humanistic Jewish upbringing, which emphasized Tikkun Olam and somehow always managed to circumvent any talk of Palestine. Despite such shocking omission, this background proved fertile ground for transition into other ideas of connection and freedom within a shared world—connection that transcends race, class, age, gender, all those qualifiers that make it easier to walk past a person on the street asking for change, eventually not even registering their face, or their self, at all. In college, I read Paulo Freire, Augustus Boal, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis—thinkers and writers and doers who spoke strongly against colonialism and offered tangible exercises for resisting its persistent rot. In one class, we met Kathy Boudin, the former Weather Underground founder imprisoned for 23 years for her role in the 1981 Brink’s robbery. My understanding of good and bad appropriately scrambled such that I soon no longer even believe in such a binary at all.

At the same time, I tended a yoga obsession—an obsession that would falter upon deeper learnings about cultural appropriation, but at the time showed me an example of how to relate to my body/mind in a more sustainable way than the neurotic, compulsive entwinement I’d built through my teens and early twenties. The Primary Yoga Sutras of Patanjali—a seminal yogic text—suggest that self-study and self-knowledge are necessary endeavors in one’s quest towards “oneness,” which to Patanjali meant “the divine,” but which to me meant grand interconnectedness among all people. 

I’d made for myself a perfect trap—one I now know underlies much of how Whiteness and white saviorism operates: I recognized grand civic and social inequities, and leaned into a belief system that I thought meant my own devotion to whatever we might call “abolitionist” or “liberatory” was a devotion that would ripple outward, forever. That my actions and decisions were so important—on account of their connection to everything—that anything I myself experienced or achieved would be an achievement and experience unto the world…”

Otherwise Hidden, of Self Erasure: A Teleology - Educator Essay, Poetry Foundation, 2025

Excerpt:

“Those in positions of great wealth and power supporting Trump’s presidency are enacting erasure—unpoetically—in its most violent form. However, working through this essay and the accompanying requisite process of interrogation brings me to a different, if unfinished, position on those suggested to be engaged in “self-erasure.” Let me—us—differentiate their actions from poetic self-erasure, as self-erasure, according to how I define it throughout this piece, requires deliberate action of, and investigation into, the un- and/or sub-conscious. This is not to suggest that all those posited… to be victims of self-erasure—those voting for Trump and against their own interests—did so out of some inherent lack of consciousness. To say so would be patronizing, assumptive, and a projection, none of which are bases upon which I care to establish—or even suggest—a theory…”

When the Museum of Memory Becomes a Haunted House - Interview with Jiordan Castle, Electric Literature, 2023

Excerpt:

“The book’s dedication—”For me then, and for you now” —immediately signals to the reader a rare intimacy; that we will be led—sometimes smiling, sometimes wincing—into a moment in time not often shared beyond the performed facade of the nuclear family…”

On Erasure - Educator Essay, Poetry Foundation, 2022

Excerpt:

“Erasure is my leaving the land acknowledgment as the last aspect to develop for a presentation.

Erasure is my attempting to suppress and/or conceal my visible neurologic disease symptoms from peers while teaching a poetry workshop.”

Performance Review: Oxygen, 2020 - response to Laura Tuthall’s multidisciplinary show on disability, art, capitalism, etc.

Excerpt:

“…If ballet’s call is to cast the illusion of beauty, youth, and ease, Tuthall responds by turning the technique on its head, coupling elegant extensions with gestures describing, amongst other traumas, self-harm and sexual violence. Most notable, though, is the way Tuthall transitions between dancing un-assisted and using her wheelchair or cane. This “unveiling” is both a direct challenge to the dance world’s pressure to hide pain and disability – or broadly, that which is mortal – and a direct challenge to ableist assumptions about permanence; that a body is either “abled” or “disabled”; that such categories are or should be recognizable to the outside eye; that identity is static….”

Her Art - personal essay, Hopwood Writing Award, 2013

Excerpt:

“… she told me about her evolving projects and how she goes through phases (she was “into sewing bloomers” a while back; she liked to play with molding small sculptures; she sang in a band), how she spends her days dancing and sleeping and eating and making art, how her mom in Texas believed in her, how she inherited her various mental pathologies from her genius theoretical physicist father. I marveled at her non-issue regarding her identity as an artist; unlike her apparent peacefulness towards being someone not fit for “the academy,” I hoard all sorts of complexes about what I “should” do, trying to reconcile my family’s expectations of my future professional career with my own doubts that such a life would even be livable, never mind happy-making. It turns out, I later learned, that she is no stranger to such insecurities, but at the time it felt like a whole new paradigm in which to imagine the acceptability of our non-standard inclinations and needs…”