I'm an associate professor of English at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark, NJ. I received my PhD in 2016, from Harvard University. Before that I was an English major at Amherst College, and wrote about ghost towns and abandoned buildings on a Watson Fellowship.

My first book, Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America, was published by Cornell University Press (2020). Recent essays have appeared in Modern Philology, Arizona Quarterly, Modernism/modernity, James Joyce Quarterly, Journal of Modern Literature, and American Literary History. I also co-edited The Selected Letters of John Berryman with Philip Coleman (Harvard University Press, 2020).

My main book project right now, Other Species and Our Feelings: Animal Ethics in Contemporary Lyric, centers on human involvement in nonhuman lives. This essay is about one reason you see birds on sidewalks, and about some of the writers seeing them these days. 

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