Chapbook
- Nest, winner of 2019 The Florida Review’s Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Prize, published March 2020.
Personal Essays
- “#pandemicdiary,” Brink magazine, no. 2, fall 2021
- “My Grief Is a Student of the Humanities,” Mid-American Review 38:1, Winter 2017 (runner-up in the Fineline Competition)
- “Monuments,” Full Grown People, November 9, 2017
- “Soft Spot,” Beautiful Things column, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, October 30, 2017
- “The Suck,” Tin House Online, October 25, 2017
- “Auteur,” Hippocampus Magazine, April 1, 2016
- “The 781 Days,” Mutha Magazine, September 17, 2015
- “The Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card,” Full Grown People, March 12, 2015 (named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016)
- “Running Late,” Readers Write column, The Sun, January 2014 (scroll to the bottom!)
- “Not So Gladly Teach,” in Moving On: Essays on the Aftermath of Leaving Academia [the whole anthology is available on Kindle here], Kathleen Miller, Julie Cmiel, Lauren Whitehead, Jet, eds., 2014
- “Dyad,” Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, May 2008
- “Will That Child Step Off the Screen and Into Our Lives?” Modern Love column, The New York Times, October 8, 2006
- “On Not Liking Kim Chee,” The North American Review, November/December 2005
Tributes
- “On Steve,” blog post about a friend and Iowa Review contributor, July 2019
- “A Tribute to David Hamilton,” written for my mentor’s retirement celebration, April 2012
Writing for Work
- “A Story of Intellectualizing an Affair,” introduction to fiction by Suzanne Scanlon, Electric Literature, April 26, 2017
- Editor’s Note to The Iowa Review vol. 42, no. 3, Winter 2012-13
- Editor’s Note to The Iowa Review vol. 42, no. 2, Fall 2012
- “Recent Memoir: Butterscotch, Black Chairs, and Breeders,” The Iowa Review, Spring 2006
Miscellanea
- “Election Candidates Aren’t ‘The Same,'” Iowa City Press-Citizen, October 6, 2016
- Introduction/Liner Notes (co-written with Kembrew McLeod), For Kids and By Kids (children’s music CD), 2015