Four years of living inside American communities -- not as a visitor passing through, but as a temporary resident staying long enough for places to reveal themselves -- has produced a body of work and a perspective I'm actively looking to bring into new contexts.
I'm open to a wide range of collaborations: academic, journalistic, institutional, and unconventional. If something you're working on intersects with this project -- or if you want to put me somewhere interesting -- I'd like to hear about it.
To start a conversation, visit the Contact page.
This is the work I'm most built for. If your organization, publication, or foundation needs ground-level intelligence from a specific community -- not a survey, not a site visit, not a think piece written from a distance -- I can go there, live there, and come back with something no remote analyst can produce.
I've done this across forty communities in twenty-eight states. I know how to find the people who don't talk to journalists, attend the events that don't make the calendar, and stay long enough for a place to stop performing. The result is reporting, research, and narrative that carries the texture of actual presence.
Potential partners include foundations funding place-based research, media organizations commissioning immersive journalism, NGOs seeking community intelligence, and corporations trying to understand the America their data doesn't show them.
I accept a limited number of commissioned essays, reported pieces, and longer-form projects for publications and organizations whose work intersects with the themes of America Beneath the Noise: identity, belonging, civic trust, and the distance between how institutions see America and how Americans actually live it.
I'm also actively developing Still American, a literary nonfiction book drawn from four years of fieldwork. If you're a publisher, editor, or agent interested in the project, I'd like to hear from you.
If you're looking for writing grounded in place, drawn from sustained observation, and honest about what this country actually looks like from the inside -- I'd like to hear from you.
I speak to organizations, conferences, universities, and leadership teams about American identity, civic trust, belonging, and what four years of immersive fieldwork revealed about the country most institutions think they understand.
Talks are drawn directly from the field -- grounded in specific places, specific people, and specific moments. They work equally well as keynotes, as seminar conversations, or as the thing that opens a longer discussion.
I'm also open to guest teaching, workshops, and writer-in-residence conversations at universities and institutions whose work touches on narrative nonfiction, field research, American studies, or civic life. If you're building a course or a program and want someone who has actually done the thing, let's talk.
Four years of living inside American communities -- not observing from a distance -- produces a kind of ground-level perspective that polling, demographic data, and media analysis rarely capture.
I share this research with academic institutions, think tanks, foundations, and organizations trying to understand what American communities actually look like when you stay long enough to see them. Presentations are grounded in specific places and specific people, not abstracted trends.
The best collaborations often start with something I haven't anticipated. If you're working on something that feels adjacent to this project -- a fellowship, a commission, a residency, a research partnership, or something harder to categorize -- reach out. I'm genuinely open to conversations that don't fit neatly into the categories above.
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