Hello Darlings,
I grew up in Richmond, Virginia spent a long time in Memphis, Tennessee but have ended up in Washington, DC for now. I’ve wanted to be a teacher since I was 16, to help people love words as I love them, and to go to the places that need good teachers more than anywhere else.
I started writing poetry when I was 14 years old in a kind of explosion of emotion and sentimentality, as many teenagers do. I stuck with it, and poetry was the lens I used to see the world and the way I spoke to myself, the way I explained existence to myself. It was cathartic and personal and sat in my journals for decades.
Teaching is the reason I write now. I moved from poetry to drama when my school couldn’t afford the rights to other productions. I wrote a play about a sad boy meeting a sad girl and fell in love with it. When I sat down to revise it, I knew it had to be a book, not a play.
That was 2016, and since then I’ve written a book for each NaNoWriMo. I write the kind of stories I love to read: young adult, middle school, and fantasy. I write for my beautiful wife, Becah, my four children, for my friends, and for myself. I can’t write anything without getting spiritual, without an argument, and without some kind of magic happening.
I transitioned in 2022, and it is thanks to my writing that I could see both how much I was hurting and how much I was using dissociation to cope with my body. As someone with autism and PTSD, I had learned to both suppress my emotions to keep me safe and put other people’s happiness and comfortability as my means to protect myself from future abusers. My work obviously explores these conversations about gender, trauma, neurodivergence, and transformation.