Below you will find a selection of my published writing. Click on the links to read the works. Click here for a more comprehensive publication list.
Nonfiction
Nominated for Best of the Net 2019 Nonfiction
The problem with concrete: it has a long lifespan and it’s hard to get rid of. You can’t burn concrete. You can’t dissolve it. The only thing you can do: find a solid that is harder and denser, chemically speaking, and start bashing away. Read more
Figs and Snaps
Published by The Burningwood Literary Journal
2020 Best of the Net Nonfiction
2021 Pushcart Prize Nominee Nonfiction
Karen Carpenter was emblazoned into my retinas in the mid-1970s. I see her as the delicate, elfin creature who tiptoed into the spotlight inside the Hersheypark Arena and simply said “hello.” Read more
Under the World
Published by Sky Island Journal
In my grandparents’ root cellar, the spiders were the world leaders. They flattened in and out of the cracks in the cement walls, vanished then reappeared from behind the rusting washer and dryer, sauntered up and over wooden crates of yellow apples, red potatoes, and orchard pears, meandered the copper pipes over human heads. They were a lazy bunch. No predators underground. No birds or frogs or army ants. Read more
Christmas 1938
Published by The Middle House Review
Nominated for Best of the Net 2020 Nonfiction
My father, as a child, became fed up with sharing the family radio, begged for a radio of his own. The silence of that Christmas morning in 1938 had taken on a solid form. The tick of the grandmother clock downstairs was not exactly threatening but, if she could have held her own pendulum, she would have, just so my father could have tiptoed down carpeted steps in a quiet that might have prevented his own twelve-year-old heart from getting away from him. Read more
Snowfall
Published by The Ravens Perch
That morning was made all the worse because it had snowed the night before. Flakes that fell slow and parallel to the ground, as if they were laying themselves down. Arriving with a shared intention. Maybe to give my young daughter and me a reason to sit quietly and watch them. A blanket for the earth because didn’t my grandmother always say that the winters of heavy snows are better for everything? Read more
Along Route 322, an often-traveled roadway of my childhood, past the turnoffs for Annville, Cleona, and Quentin, a thing of exquisite and recurring beauty—an automobile salvage yard that everyone simply called “the junkyard.” Cars dumped and clumped, leaning affectionately into each other. A handsewn quilt of many colors rolling up and over the gentle hills so common in Central Pennsylvania. Read more
Early on Sunday
Published by Oyster River Pages
I knew something was different because when we got to the high school gymnasium, my father picked me up and didn’t put me down. He always let me walk in crowded places as long as I held his hand. I didn’t want to be carried in his arms anymore. I was five. I wasn’t a baby. But everything that morning felt different. Read more
Fiction
Aerial View
Published by Streetlight Magazine
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2021
Hannah Fisher keeps the curtains closed in every room of the farmhouse night and day. Windowsills are stuffed with juice glasses brimming seasonal wildflowers: delicate, snow-white Queen Anne’s Lace, purple chicory, periwinkle cornflowers. Read more
Cora
Published by Five on the Fifth
Psychologists claim the color red makes you hungry. Cora Henson knows that’s bullshit. A stomach is either full enough or careening toward growling empty. Staring at a color won’t change that. Read more
Fire
Published by Five on the Fifth
For three months, Harold watched the distant fire licking its way across the low lying meadows trying to get to him. In the beginning, it was only a wisp like a curl of hair stamped onto the horizon. He had welcomed it then. It was something new. Read more
Discovery
Published by South Florida Poetry Journal
You think you would be cooling down, growing colder, when you are newly dead. It turns out. That’s not true. You are hot. Your lips spark as you set them gently and absent-mindedly together. Read more
Homecoming
Published by The Bookends Review
Jillian Reese is sipping a venti Starbucks Green Tea Frappuccino on a bench in the Men’s Department of Nordstrom’s. So far, for the occasion of her fiancé’s return from a three-year deployment in Afghanistan, she hasn’t garnered the energy she needs to begin searching for something special to wear on the day she welcomes him home. Read more
Elias Wolf
Published by The Broadkill Review
Elias Wolf is a perfect name for a vampire, and the Elias Wolf who lived in my hometown of Putnum, West Virginia, certainly looked the part. Tall and rail-thin. Lustrous, black hair tapping his shoulders. Skin earthworm pale. Read more
Poetry
Choose a Memory to Keep
Published by Sunbeam Anthology
First Place Winner of the Joan Ramseyer Poetry Contest
Topography
Published by Haunted Waters Press
Some Day We Will Replace that Hideous Window
Published by Streetlight Magazine
Chores
Published by The Write Launch
Relativity: A Lithograph my M.C. Escher
Published by The Write Launch
Another Kind Man
Published by The Write Launch
The News
Published by Two Hawks Quarterly
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2022