ESSAYS
“My Pantheon of Heroes for Powerless Times”
{Zócalo Public Square, August 24, 2026)
“Saving the Great American Road Trip”
(Zócalo Public Square, the Los Angeles Times, and the Saturday Evening Post, July 4, 2025)
“Ekphrastic Influences”
(LitHub, December 13, 2024)
“When the World Seems Awful, I Submerge Myself in the Vastness of the Universe”
(Zócalo Public Square, October 17, 2024)
“What is a 21st-Century ‘Writer’s Home’?”
(Zócalo Public Square, August 12, 2024)
“Emo Music Made Me a Better Man”
(Zócalo Public Square, June 2023)
“How Is Poetry Like a Political Campaign?”
(The Houston Chronicle & Zócalo Public Square, January 2023)
“Teaching Emily Dickinson to Men”
(The Boston Globe, August 2022)
“How Our Greatest Poets Found America Riding Public Transportation”
(LA Times, Zócalo Public Square, & The Boston Globe, February 2022)
“The Poet Sits in the Dentist’s Chair”
(Zócalo Public Square and The Boston Globe, July 2021)
“I Know a Man”
(essay review, Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, November 2021)
"Ten New Ways to Read Ronald Johnson's Radios"
(Poetry Daily and the Kenyon Review, summer 2015)
“Walt Whitman’s iPad”
(Poetry Northwest, May 18, 2015)
“The First Time: On W. S. Merwin”
(Memorious, April 1, 2012)