About
I’m a writer, editor, and educator. I work as the editorial director at Are.na and write about art, design, language, and technology.
I've contributed writing to The New York Times, The Atlantic, Frieze, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Creative Independent, Pioneer Works’ The Broadcast, The Serving Library, and other web and print publications.
Recently I've been thinking a lot about publishing as a practice for the creation of new networks and communities. I also teach, mostly writing to graphic designers, and give lectures, guest critiques, and writing workshops. I collaborate on various publishing projects, mostly with friends, and many times with people who don't consider themselves writers, but are.
Writing
An essay on grief, memory, the mind, and the limits of the brain-computer metaphor. A personal one for me; grateful for the care, trust, and editorial guidance from Daisy Alioto, and first reads from Jessi Haley and Kai Schnier.
An interview with Tracy on PORTAL, her new book of poems about the things we inherit—memory, language, culture—and how being in a new place can cast these things into a different relief.
An essay on Hedda Sterne’s aerosol paintings and the relentless momentum of New York.
An essay for Elina Birkehag’s artist book D is for Daughter, about secret languages, trees talking, messages hidden in plain sight, and memory work, which is so often women’s work.
An article about the nascent little world of digital literary magazines and the interactive stories and computational poetry that are meant to exist on the web.
A write-up for HFBK Hamburg’s Lerchenfeld magazine of the Never Ready conference, held by the Klasse Digitale Grafik.
An interactive piece on alt text, the image descriptions that people who are blind or have low vision often rely on when navigating the web.
An essay on the evolution of the gender star, an asterisk placed within German nouns to denote gender inclusivity and neutrality.
An essay for Coral Saucedo Lomelì’s artist book An Incomplete History of Pierced Vessels, on holes, women, water, sieves, and “fatal formlessness.”
An essay introduction to Mitko Mitkov’s text and sound project MANUAL, a Telegram group-turned-website-turned-album.
A tap-through essay on artist Aarati Akkapeddi’s work "I know if I walked in your footsteps, it would become a ritual," a series of machine-generated images of their mom, Sudha Akkapeddi.
An interview with Soft Protest Digest, a research collective developing “environmentally and culturally resilient” dishes.
An essay on Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and the "typewritings" that she mailed all around the world from behind the Berlin wall.
An essay for Pioneer Works’ publication The Broadcast on Aarati Akkapeddi’s memory work with GANS and family photos. Fuzzy and unfixed, a spectre more familiar than accurate, Akkapeddi’s generated images look uncannily close to how memory feels.
An article on The New Woman’s Survival Catalog, the “feminist Whole Earth Catalog,” which was a bestseller in 1973 that all but disappeared before getting a recent reissue.
An interview with writer Anna Della Subin on the virtues of idleness, procrastination as its own form of productivity, and the mythological power of sleep.
An essay on the 19th century attempt to create a universal language by Alexander Melville Bell and the resulting alphabet codifying the articulation of speech sounds.
An interview with Sheila Levrant de Bretteville about the Woman's Building in L.A., the shortcomings of the second wave, and design pedagogy seeped in activism.
An essay on Alvin Lustig, who designed blind in his last years of life, and Elaine Lustig Cohen, who served as his eyes and hands before becoming a well-known designer in her own right.
Projects
A print and online publication that came out of a seminar I taught to MFA students at VCU in spring 2024. Each piece starts with an image, and was the final project of a seminar that explored how visual writing can be and how language-based image-making can be.
A digital publication of eight works from Are.na and Naive Yearly, a conference on the quiet, odd, and poetic web. Featuring pieces from Chia Amisola, Elliott Cost, Benjamin Earl, Tiana Dueck, Laurel Schwulst, Marty Bell, Maya Man, and Alice Yuan Zhang.
For Montez Press Radio, Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, Michelle Santiago Cortés, Sharon Neema and I talked about what we’ve been thinking through by way of an Are.na channel. I wrote a meandering intro essay on shimmering ideas, language, and writing as image-making. Rigo spoke about rural electrification and energetic futures. Michelle ruminated on blood, mysticism, Vampires as hyper-Catholics, and “collaboration as contamination.” And Sharon on attention, notetaking as an act of noticing, and small repeated acts of care.
A yearly anthology of writing from the people of Are.na.
A book about the multiverse, made with Everything Everywhere All At Once filmmakers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.
A series of essays that asked artists and technologists to offer their hopes for the future of the web.
Six-issue graphic design magazine, each designed by a different designer
Work Experience
Teaching a grad seminar on writing in the graphic design department
Editing for Source Type, a platform for typographic research and visual literacy from Laurenz Brunner.
Editing exhibition materials and the journal for digital art gallery Feral File, co-founded by Casey Reas.
Co-taught a seminar on digital publishing for Masters graphic design students, along with Julia Novitch, about the poetics and parameters of webzines.
Edited for AIGA’s Eye on Design, a graphic design magazine
Speaking
Talk at a symposium for Virginia Tech students on publishing and design.
A conversation, organized and moderated with Are.na, for the series "Internet(s of Everything)" around the question of “How can we be generous with our curiosity online?”
A lecture on design writing for the History of Graphic Design and Contemporary Graphic Design classes.
A seminar around design and the environment, featuring Benedetta Crippa, Jarrett Fuller, Julia Watson, Anoushka Khandwala, Joycelyn Longdon, Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Jonny Black, and Scott Starrett. Organized and led by me.
An intro and post-lecture interview with David Reinfurt on the life and work of Muriel Cooper.
A lecture and workshop on the beauty of simple, plainspoken language for thesis design students at Parsons.
A talk on editing Eye on Design and publishing as a generative act.
Contact
Teams
