Books and Journals I Have Edited
Comics & Cultural Theory
Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore: Critical Essays on the Graphic Novels
McFarland, 2012 · Co-edited with Joseph Michael Sommers
Alan Moore, the idiosyncratic, controversial, and often shocking writer of such works as Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and V for Vendetta, remains a benchmark for readers of comics and graphic novels. This collection investigates the political, social, cultural, and sexual ideologies that emerge from his seminal work, Lost Girls, and demonstrates how these ideologies relate to his larger body of work.
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Film & Cultural Theory
Terror and the Cinematic Sublime: Essays on Violence and the Unpresentable in Post-9/11 Films
McFarland, 2013 · Co-edited with Lloyd Isaac Vayo
This collection considers film in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Eleven essayists address Hollywood movies, indie film, and post-cinematic media, including theatrical films by directors such as Steven Spielberg, Darren Aronofsky, Quentin Tarantino, and Spike Lee, as well as post-cinematic works by Wafaa Bilal, Douglas Gordon, and Peter Tscherkassky. All of the essays are written with an eye to what may be the central concept of our time, the sublime.
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Political & Cultural Criticism
What Comes After Occupy? The Regional Politics of Resistance
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015
Occupy Wall Street, as centered in New York City, received much publicity. Less attention has been given to the movement’s regional forms and to the ways Occupy developed across distinct local settings. This edited volume turns to those broader geographies, examining how the politics of occupation took shape in places beyond Zuccotti Park and how resistance was refracted through local histories, pressures, and communities.
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Edited Journal Issue
Disability Studies and Ecocriticism Studies in the Humanities
2020 · Co-edited with Christine Junker
Published as a double thematic issue of Studies in the Humanities, this 2020 journal project, co-edited with Dr. Christine Junker, brings disability studies and ecocriticism into direct conversation. The issue examines embodiment, environment, vulnerability, and the cultural meanings of disability within ecological thought and criticism.
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Science Fiction & Cultural Studies
Who Needs Family? How the Doctor’s Non-Domesticity Interrupts History
In Peregrinations, Ruminations, and Regenerations, ed. Chris Hansen · Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010
This chapter argues that the Doctor’s refusal of home, family, and settled identity is not incidental to Doctor Who. It is what allows him to interrupt the stories that power calls natural, domestic, and inevitable. Reading the 2005 series through domesticity, empire, the Daleks, Satellite 5, and the TARDIS itself, the essay shows how the Doctor becomes a figure of estrangement, a body that cannot be comfortably folded into history.
Order on Amazon →Disability Studies & Appalachian Writing
Finding Myself Elsewhere: My Impaired, Appalachian Self
In Appalachian Disability Anthology, ed. Kendra Winchester · University Press of Kentucky, 2027
This essay considers disability, Appalachia, and selfhood as lived conditions rather than abstract categories. It asks what it means to understand the self through impairment, region, memory, and movement, and what happens when leaving home does not mean leaving the body, or the past, behind.
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Disability Studies & Comics
The Hidden Architecture of Disability: Chris Ware’s Building Stories
In Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives, ed. Chris Foss, Zach Whalen, Jonathan Gray · Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016
This chapter reads Chris Ware’s Building Stories as a work whose form is marked by disability as much as its protagonist is. The essay argues that the boxed, fragmented, difficult-to-order structure of Ware’s comic turns reading into a bodily process. Disability becomes both a subject and a problem of form, exposing the reader’s desire for wholeness, closure, and a stable body of meaning.
Order on Amazon →Poems & Verses
Appalachian Journal: As the Crow Flies
A Late Night Frittata on Lancaster Street
From Haintology: Poems and Visitations. A dead woman returns at 2:00 am with a simple request. The speaker opens the refrigerator and tries to answer.
Read →Northern Appalachia Review
While At Eyecare Associates, My Dead Mother Walks In
From Haintology: Poems and Visitations. Without his glasses, the speaker sees his dead mother across the waiting room. Then the new lenses arrive.
Read →Friends Journal
The Silence of Rockford Chapel
From Haintology: Poems and Visitations. At his first Quaker meeting, the speaker enters the silence with too many theories. Then the room begins to answer.
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The Domestic Politics of Disability in Octavia Butler’s Kindred
JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory · 48.1 · Winter 2018. This essay reads Kindred through disability, home, race, and the violent comfort of domestic space. It argues that Dana’s wounded body does not simply mark trauma. It breaks open the fantasy of the self-contained, able-bodied subject and exposes the home as a place built through history, relation, and coercion.
The Disabled Hero: Being and Ethics in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings
Mythlore · 35.1 · Fall 2016. This essay argues that Jackson’s films are shaped by wounds that do not heal. Frodo’s disability becomes an ethical opening, set against Sauron’s desire for a sealed, powerful, self-sufficient body. The trilogy becomes a meditation on pain, dependence, and the danger of stories that try too hard to make the world whole again.
A Mortal Agency: Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds
Journal of Modern Literature · 31.2 · 2008. This essay reads Flann O’Brien’s comic, unruly novel as a political response to colonial surveillance. It argues that Irish identity in At Swim-Two-Birds is shaped by systems of watching, writing, and control, but that the novel imagines another kind of agency: finite, mortal, messy, and grounded in relation rather than mastery.
Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren
JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory · 35.2 · 2006. This essay reads Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren against the urge to turn difficult books into monuments. Bellona, the novel’s ruined city, becomes a wound in national myth, subjectivity, and narrative order. The essay argues that Dhalgren keeps returning to birth, not as origin or arrival, but as exposure to others.
This Aggression Will Not Stand: Myth, War, and Ethics in The Big Lebowski
SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism · 34.2 · 2005. This essay reads The Big Lebowski as a broken war story disguised as a comic detective western. The film’s wandering plot, borrowed genres, and failed heroism interrupt the myths that turn violence into national purpose. The Dude’s passivity is not simple innocence, but part of the film’s uneasy argument about war, mourning, and ethical response.
Pacifism as Ideological Complicity in The Big Lebowski
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture · 7.3 · 2007. This essay argues that the Dude’s pacifism is less innocent than it appears. By remaining in conversation with Walter, the Dude becomes part of the rational, violent order he seems to resist. The essay finds a more radical interruption in Larry Sellers’s silence, which briefly exposes Walter’s militarized certainty to mortality, failure, and the other he cannot absorb.
Being Singular Plural on Main Street
Introduction to What Comes After Occupy? The Regional Politics of Resistance · Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. This introduction argues that Occupy should not be remembered only through Zuccotti Park. It turns instead to smaller, less glamorous sites where Occupy was repeated, changed, and locally remade. The piece uses Occupy Defiance to ask how radical politics survives when it leaves the symbolic center and has to live on Main Street.
Body Politics: Unearthing an Embodied Ethics in V for Vendetta
In Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore, ed. Comer and Sommers · McFarland, 2012. This essay argues that V for Vendetta does more than oppose fascism. It also risks repeating fascism’s desire to escape the body. Against V’s abstraction, the essay turns to Valerie’s writing as a more embodied form of resistance, one grounded in vulnerability, desire, and the fragile persistence of human connection.
Introduction: Disability Studies and Ecocriticism
Co-written and co-edited with Christine Junker. Double thematic issue of Studies in the Humanities · 2020. This introduction frames a conversation between disability studies and ecocriticism, asking how bodies and environments shape one another. It treats vulnerability, dependence, embodiment, and ecological relation as shared concerns rather than separate critical problems.
The Indigestibility of the World; or, Birthing the Posthuman in Spielberg’s A.I.
In Terror and the Cinematic Sublime, ed. Comer and Vayo · McFarland, 2013. This chapter reads Spielberg’s A.I. through the posthuman, the artificial child, and the uneasy limits of human care. It asks what happens when technology does not simply imitate humanity, but exposes the hunger, grief, and exclusion already built into the human world.
There’s Got To Be a Mourning, After: Terror and the (Post)Cinematic Sublime
Introduction, with Isaac Vayo, to Terror and the Cinematic Sublime · McFarland, 2013. This introduction frames post-9/11 film through terror, mourning, violence, and the sublime. It asks how cinema responds when history exceeds representation, and how films try to give form to grief, shock, and what cannot be easily shown.
The Polarizing of Alan Moore’s Sexual Politics
Introduction, with Joseph Sommers, to Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore · McFarland, 2012. This introduction frames Alan Moore’s work through sexuality, ideology, power, and contradiction. It presents Moore’s comics as a body of work that resists easy moral placement, where liberation, exploitation, fantasy, embodiment, and politics often occupy the same unstable ground.
Essays, Reviews & Other Writing
The Hardest Thing About AI: Knowing When Not to Use It
Visionary Voices · Philanthropy.org · June 10, 2026 · This essay argues that the hardest part of using AI is not learning the tool, but knowing when to put it down. Routine work can often be handed to AI. Creative work cannot. For nonprofits, program design, writing, and invention require local knowledge, lived context, and the slow friction of thinking through a problem oneself.
Confessions of an Ex-Postmodernist
Patheos · August 18, 2015. This essay looks back on postmodern Christianity, hospitality, privilege, and the limits of intellectual ideals when they meet the body. It begins with theory and faith, but turns toward lived experience, asking what happens when brokenness stops being a beautiful idea and becomes something one has to survive.
Defying the Certainty of the Christian Right
Killing the Buddha · June 4, 2015. This essay responds to a Christian nationalist reading of American history by asking what certainty hides. Moving from a conservative West Virginia childhood church to a public rebuttal of Earl Taylor, it argues that interpretation is never innocent, especially when faith, whiteness, patriarchy, and nostalgia present themselves as common sense.
Knuckles Muldoon: Or, One Viewpoint on the Plural Nature of the Liberal Arts
Faculty column · DC Magazine · Summer 2015. Beginning with a leprechaun whiskey decanter, this essay (pages 16-17 at the link) turns a strange classroom object into a lesson in perspective. Knuckles Muldoon becomes a way to think about stereotype, power, truth, and the liberal arts as the habit of slowing down before deciding what one knows.
Celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day
The Crescent News · Defiance, OH · January 18, 2016. A public reflection on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the civic work of memory, justice, and moral accountability.
The Terminal and Dogville
Film reviews of Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal (DreamWorks, 2004) and Lars von Trier’s Dogville (Zentropa, 2003) · Journal of Religion and Film · 9.1 · 2005. These reviews consider two sharply different cinematic worlds, one shaped by Spielberg’s comic humanism and one by von Trier’s severe moral theater.
Review: Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (Routledge, 1998) · Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies · 2.1 · 2000. A review of a major reference work in postcolonial studies, focused on the vocabulary, assumptions, and critical tools that shaped the field at the turn of the century.
Under Review
● Circulating to Publishers
Poetry Collection
Haintology: Poems and Visitations
Manuscript complete
Haintology: Poems and Visitations is a poetry manuscript drawing from Jacques Derrida, Appalachian folklore, and the language of haunting. It is also, more simply, a book about loss: the dead who remain, the places that will not leave us, and the voices that return whether called or not.
● Under Editorial Review
Essay
Tied Down: Lifted Up
Under editorial review
Tied Down: Lifted Up is under editorial review for Hand to Mouth: Southern Writers on Poverty, edited by Dr. Monic Ductan and published by Loblolly Press. The essay moves through family violence, Parkersburg poverty, Pentecostal faith, and the women who helped keep the speaker’s mother alive. It resists the easy uplift story, asking what gets lost when survival is retold as individual triumph.
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Mock Letter to the Editor
Re “Train is Derailed, Four are Injured in Tuesday Crash”
Under editorial review
A mock letter to the editor from the train involved in the famous 1955 Chocolate Train Wreck in Hamilton, NY. The piece is under review by Nikita Boyer, editor of a magazine focused on Hamilton, NY, to be published by Arts at the Palace.
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