My work

The scholarly project I am currently working on considers care ethics and college composition. Careful Compositions and Careless Constructions critiques the transatlantic settler-colonial logics of literacy practices from the Napoleonic War to the U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan. This work draws on lenses from digital pedagogy and disability studies to examine canonical works by Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Edith Wharton–and more (For starters: archival materials by disabled Civil War veterans, audio journalism about race, culture, and technology, and digital artifacts of pandemic instruction co-created with disabled college instructors.) The question this project poses to its readers is one I have framed to fellow teachers in workshops as much as to my first-year writing students in our classrooms: in a painful time, (how) can antiracist practices and literacy practices overlap with and extend practices of care?

The creative project I am (forever) finishing is a memoir-in-essays titled The Intimate Register. Spanning the seven years I spent working as an American Sign Language (ASL)-English sign language interpreter, the book describes that work while witnessing, where possible, the impact of ableist systems–especially schools–on Deaf people. Since I left ASL-English interpreting because of my own disabilities, the book explores that identity alongside others (whiteness, maleness). I learned to sign while my father went deaf, a complicated relationship to this non-native but necessary home language. Set mainly in the years when I first became a father of a son, the book also interrogates my relationship to signing, as well as the way that disability shapes not just public relationships but private ones. Read the title essay in Apogee.

Me me

In no particular order: Sixth-generation Vermonter raising two kids + 1 dog in the Lenapehoking; 100% product of public education; coffee snob; radio nerd; grown-up oldest child (redundant); anti surveillance state but pro chore chart; late-blooming globe-trotter; TRU-BIZ bilingual; slow reader; fast runner; bad at capitalism, good at care. Lives on an island.