BA, Harvard University. MFA, New York University. Author of the novel, The Men Can't Be Saved (August 2023, Overlook/Abrams), one of Vanity Fair’s Top 20 Books of 2023, and the poetry collection For the Love of Endings (Four Way Books, 2018), named one of Adroit’s Best Poetry Collections of the Year. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Slate, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A former Guernica editor, he is the founder of Back Draft, an interview series focused on revision and the creative process. He currently lives in Jersey City. SLC, 2023–
Graduate Courses 2025-2026
Master of Fine Arts in Writing
Fiction Workshop: The Arrow of Time
Seminar—Spring
WRIT 7306
Life, friends, is linear. We march ever onward—minute by minute, day by day. Blah. But in fiction? We zip ahead to the future, then dip back into the past. We flash, dilate, tease, jump, or lapse entirely. This is, at least in part, the magic of storytelling: total freedom of temporal movement. But how do you make good use of that freedom? How do you activate an experience for your reader that’s at once bold and seamless, bloody raw and richly considered? In this workshop, we will turn our eye to how your writing navigates—and manipulates—time. We will examine how temporal shifts can influence tone, both on the level of the story as well as the sentence. We will also engage with a wide range of contemporary short-story writers—such as Justin Torres, Jenny Zhang, Zadie Smith, Zach Williams, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore, and Ben Lerner—to see what we can pick up from the tools and strategies that they introduce. But our primary focus will be your work and mobilizing the possibilities that lie within it.