WORKS-IN-PROGRESS

THE BOULDER SERIES (10-issue literary zine, in progress)

Issues 4 and 5 out now! 

A serialized fiction following Darwin and Jeff, two roommates navigating gig economy precarity through the absurdist machinery of platform capitalism. Inspired by Camus’s Sisyphus, the series traces Darwin’s transformation from being pushed by the boulder to choosing it. 

PETRICHOR: A NOVEL

A novel composed of interconnected pieces that explore how memory and trauma move through generations. The work follows Jorie across different ages—from eight to fifty—as moments layer and repeat with variation, building a portrait of survival shaped by displacement, family violence, and the weight of inherited patterns.

Rather than unfolding chronologically, the pieces operate like musical composition: recurring images (lotion, plantains, yellow bows, salt) accumulate meaning as they appear in different contexts and timeframes. Each piece works independently while contributing to a larger architecture where single moments contain multiple lifetimes, and the past isn’t separate from the present—it’s superimposed onto it.

The novel investigates how consciousness documents what happens to us, and how we carry forward what we inherit—whether we choose to or not.

(October 2025 to date) 

PORTRAIT PROJECT: NAIOMI 

The longitudinal project (2020 to date) is more than just an attempt to capture identity formation but it also documents how relationships evolve when given space to breathe, how the camera records transformation that happens too slowly for daily observation, how the ritual of annual meeting—a deliberate constraint—creates its own form of connection.

I photograph Naiomi once per year—no more—with only occasional text messages between sessions. We save our conversations for these annual meetings, creating a rhythm that mirrors how relationships actually develop: through accumulated time rather than constant contact. However, during our last photoshoot in September 2025, she asked me to break tradition and meet more than once yearly—a request that itself documents how our connection had evolved beyond the project’s original constraints. I agreed, uncertain whether abandoning the annual constraint would transform the very thing I was trying to document. But we’re humans, first meeting as mentor/mentee, then as photographer/subject, then as friends.

View project documentation and photos

COMPLETED PROJECTS

JOY:  SEVEN ETUDES

A formal investigation testing whether literary techniques developed for writing complexity—compression, temporal layering, and fragmented recursion—can sustain joy when joy is understood as equally intricate as difficulty.

Seven short pieces, each built around a recursive practice: boxing, eating sushi, housecleaning, seeing, presence, slowing down, water. Each uses temporal superposition—a single moment containing all previous instances of that gesture—to create depth through accumulated experience rather than narrative arc.

The investigation required defining joy before the forms could hold it. Each etude tested a different hypothesis—joy in precision, in solitude, in persistence, in cognition, in its absence, in stillness, in surrender—and the definition built incrementally through the writing itself. Joy emerged as something requiring nothing but itself: braided with difficulty, not separate from it. A ground of being, not a response to circumstance.

The forms aren’t trauma-locked—they’re complexity-locked. They hold whatever has sufficient density regardless of emotional register.

November 2025 – February 2026

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CIPRIANI

A short story told over wine at Grand Central Terminal. Maya and Cecilia—two women whose lives once orbited the same failing venture—meet years later to talk about Susan, who has died. What emerges is a story about credit and debt, visible and invisible labor, and who gets to be the subject of a narrative. This story asks for a particular kind of reading.

Now available in digital format (free, suggested donation) right here.

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A TRILOGY OF DISPLACEMENT: Neural Maps, Physical Journeys, and Digital Exploitation

The zine trilogy traces displacement across three interconnected landscapes. Together, these works map displacement as both destruction and adaptation. From Mateo’s cognitive reconstruction to Edwin and Stella’s fractured reunion to Erika’s moral compromise, the trilogy reveals how survival under displacement operates across scales—neurological, intimate, and systemic—refusing the consolation of redemptive narratives in favor of precise attention to how displacement actually works.

 

 

A Study in Cartography: Fragments and Patterns

A circulation experiment tracking how 25 hand-bound copies of a fragmented narrative find their readers. The story follows Mateo, a refugee child with selective mutism, through three separate booklets that require physical reconstruction of meaning—mirroring the cognitive work trauma survivors perform daily.The project tests whether art objects designed from specific consciousness patterns can locate readers who share similar cognitive architecture. Through strategic distribution at zine fairs, bookstores, and social media exchanges, the work documents which readers engage deeply enough to contact the artist post-reading.

Goal: To investigate whether direct circulation can create meaningful artist-reader recognition based on shared processing patterns rather than broad market appeal.

Method: 25 hand-bound copies with kettle stitching resembling neural pathways, systematic tracking of reader responses and circulation patterns.

 

Status: Completed – ongoing reader engagement study

 

View project documentation

 

NYC is Big, My Dreams are Bigger

A bidirectional zine that challenges how immigrant stories are told. Edwin’s narrative moves forward while Stella’s excavates backwards, forcing readers to experience displacement through form itself. Rather than presenting immigration as simple escape or achievement, the work reveals the hidden costs of survival—sexual violence, childhood trauma, and the weight of secrets that shape the storytelling. The physical format requires active navigation, making readers complicit in the disorientation that defines immigrant experience. This compression of multiple truths into one small object proves that some stories can only be accessed through unfamiliar paths.

Status: New release – seeking readers

View project documentation

The Long Game