Author Statement

I grew up in rural Alabama, in a house where silence was both a strategy and a survival skill. Like many Southern families, we learned early what could be spoken aloud and what had to be carried quietly. I learned how to read rooms before I learned how to read books. I learned how to disappear. I learned how to endure. Writing came later—as a way to name what had been left unnamed.

My work lives at the intersection of the rural South, queerness, memory, and inherited silence. I write about the ways families protect themselves by forgetting, about the stories we’re taught to tell and the ones we’re taught to bury, and about what happens when we finally refuse to do either.

My memoir-in-progress explores family violence, queerness, and the long work of unlearning what survival once required.

I believe language is a form of reclamation. I believe telling the truth—plainly, carefully, and without ornament—is a way of choosing something better than what we were handed.

I live and write in the South with my wife, still learning what it means to stay and tell the story anyway.