The Summer King.


The Summer King is based on the life of Josh Gibson, one of the greatest Negro League baseball players. A home run hitting catcher, Gibson was often called the Black Babe Ruth, and had a career spanning from the late 1920s until his death in 1947, only several months before Jackie Robinson broke the Major League color barrier. The opera presents Josh on his dying day, a broken and sick man, prone to hallucinations and unable to clearly distinguish the past from the present. Josh alternately beckons to an imaginary Joe DiMaggio, and interacts with characters and events of his own past as they materialize before him.

I co-wrote the libretto for the two-act opera with composer Daniel Sonenberg. It is produced in conjunction with American Opera Projects [Brooklyn, NY]. There have been performances at First Chance series at AOP, April 19-20, 2005; VOX and Friends, presented through the The Libretto Reading Series, American Opera Projects, Symphony Space, Leonard Nimoy Thalia, Ned Canty, director, May 26, 2004; and Manhattan School of Music, Caren France, director, May 1, 2004.


The Juvenilia page.

An ongoing archive of creative work from 1983-1991. Opens in new window.


The Todd Colby voice mail message.

This message from writer Todd Colby has been saved on my cellphone since May 2005, and to make sure it's never accidentally erased, I recorded it from a landline phone onto my crappy iTalk microphone; thus the buzz. It's well worth a listen, however; Todd is ostensibly returning a call about my interview with him for Bookslut. Apparently he decided to express his love for me and offer his own special brand of jingoism.


My eighth grade journal, 1981-1982.


I kept a journal when I was 13-14 years old. The Acme steno pad pages have started to fray and yellow, and so to preserve them I have scanned each page and put it back together in a PDF. Click here to see my ongoing PDF assemblage project online, or right-click the link to save onto your computer; or to see a page with links to individual scans, open this new window.


My Online Literary Journals presentation.

Put together first for the 11th Annual Writers Conference at Penn in October 2005, I placed it up here on the website, control freak that I am, so I would be assured I'd have all my content where I need it to be. It's an ongoing presentation (i.e., I'll fix the typos and add to it later), since from time to time I am asked to do this same talk. Check it out here.


Random Five-Paragraph Prose Poem Generator.

Inspired by some linguistic coding and a very clever man named Don Cross, I made a page that generates prose poems in a five-paragraph form. Basically, I used his code and replaced them with words and phrases that have been in my files.

The page will open in a new window to your left. Right-click and hit refresh, or close and re-open to see a new set of prose poems. The raw code itself is worth looking at as well. Right now, I'm working on a "sequel" of sorts, making changes to the sentence and paragraph structures.


Two Exaggerated Self-Portraits.

Fine art printing as part of The Center for Book Arts Broadside Reading Series, Sarah Nicholls designer, 2005. Available for purchase ($10) at their website.