Category Writing – Nonfiction

2026 Notable In Best American Essays

What a nice surprise to learn that my essay on Langston Hughes in Carmel for Alta was a notable in the 2026 Best American Essays! You can read Vigilantes at the Door here.

Goodbye Salon

I’m sad about Salon closing. Here is my one and only piece for them: A 2003 interview with Ani Difranco. It was a great conversation, not too long after 9/11–a very different time.

The Guardian: Sex and the Sea Snail

For The Guardian, I got to witness researchers attempt to spawn the endangered white abalone, giant marine snails that live off the California coast.It was a surprisingly uplifting and hopeful experience, despite all the challenges these creatures face (including the…

Alta: Last West Play

I wrote about a new play, Last West, about the photographer Dorothea Lange. Read here!

Alta: Vigilantes at the Door

For Alta, I wrote about Langston Hughes’s time in Carmel, California in 1933. As a Communist and a black man, he became the target of Conservative aggression and violence. So he wrote his short story collection The Ways of White…

calilfornia condor

Alta Article: Condors Lords of the Fly

For Alta Magazine, I wrote an ode to the California condor: I don’t know when I started looking for California condors in the sky. It must have been when I was a child growing up in Humboldt County, before I…

Article: DDP in The Guardian

For The Guardian, I wrote about the DNA Doe Project, a volunteer organization using investigative genetic genealogy to track down the identities of Jane and John Does. I was amazed by the number of cases they’ve solved–some of these people…

Article: Better Diversity Through Cloning

For Alta Journal, I wrote about San Diego’s Frozen Zoo, which is cloning endangered animals to revitalize their genetic diversity. I look into the cases of the last wild horses and the black-footed ferret and ask, can cloning save them?…