As a process-based creative writer working across genres—fiction, poetry, hardboiled crime fiction, true-crime verse, flash noir—I allow the identity of a project to locate the final form. 

A queer artist, I filter ideas through a phenomenological lens, mining the patterns and occlusions that shape awareness in a text. I strive to inhabit and subvert tropes (e.g., the femme fatale, the wisecracking PI, and noir signatures) to shake the heteronormative, perceptual constructs that limit storytelling modes.

In my poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms, I foreground voice and the re-imagining of place. Raw, visceral, lush, obsessed—my lines are crafted to inject immediacy while simultaneously masking slow boils. The broken opulence and gritty beauty of the Rust Belt School aesthetic continue to inform my practice. I’m interested in creating narrative methods to explore masquerade, deception, revelation, and the encoding/decoding of social mores to scrutinize notions of authenticity and illusion.

Earning a PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster University, focusing on the craft practice and critical study of queer crime fiction, particularly queer hardboiled fiction, I view constraints as generative—invitations to innovate within genre expectations and deepen reader engagement. From my poetry collections published by Clemson University Press, to my hardboiled-inspired queer Kantian sleuth series, an ethos of ache unites my work. Taking structural and temporal risks is intended to enrich the literary discourse and push the boundaries of form. I am passionate about developing crime fiction that serves to break new ground with its thematic and stylistic synthesis.

I am grateful to be part of the Creative Writing vanguard at Lancaster University, one of the first universities to recognize Creative Writing as an academic practice in 1969. In Lancaster’s unique PhD program, criticality and creativity are not separately realized elements: they form a dynamic process and represent a dialectic that shapes the final project.

My critical work on queer crime fiction is driven by similar process-based explorations and interdisciplinary cross-pollination. My research interests are socio/cultural locations in crime fiction and how queer and historically marginalized creative writers are claiming and reinventing genre tropes—offering social comment within gripping psychological mysteries. I am developing a collection of critical essays examining the hardboiled crime fiction genre, creative practice, and the relationship between reading and writing for LGBTQ and underrepresented crime fiction writers.