Essays

“150 White Cotton Gloves”, WLZ 3, January 2018. (In print only.)

“All in the Pumpkins”, Orion Magazine, October 2023.

“Art Therapy Before Surgery”, Catapult, 26 September 2017.

“Bedtime Stories for Ghosts: Reading Aristotle to Coco Chanel and Other Encounters with a Massive Art Installation”, Electric Literature, September 2015.

“Boiled Boot”, The Fiddlehead, Issue 291, Spring 2022. (In print only.)

“Cosmic Fruit”, Orion Magazine, Summer 2019.

“Dark Fruit: A Cultural and Personal History of the Plum”, Los Angeles Review of Books, October 2016.

“A Dill in Every Soup,” Orion Magazine, Summer 2021.

“Dispatch from a Pandemic: Chicago”, Another Chicago Magazine, 24 April 2020.

“How to Finish a Novel in Only 15 Years”, The Nervous Breakdown.

“In the Face of Chronic Illness, I’m Choosing to Adopt”, Healthline, 29 June 2018.

“I Had a Mysterious Infection, It Changed the Course of My Life”. Newsweek, 19 October 2022.

“Mapping Imagination”,  Airplane Reading, July 2012; Anthologized in Airplane Reading (Zero Books, 2016).

“Poems That Helped Me Write Novels”, Submittable, 26 February, 2018.

“The Sexual Life of Agnes Matzerath in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum“, Hotel, Volume 1, 2002.

“Threads of Memory”, Jewish in Seattle, February/March 2016.

“Twenty-Six Notes on Cannibalism”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 5 September 2017.

“Used To Be Schwartz”, The Rumpus, 23 April 2016.

“Vision Loss and the Ekphrastic Novelist”, Poets & Writers Magazine, 27 September 2022.

“Writing a Holocaust novel without writing about the Holocaust”, Salon, 9 December 2017.