Hello. 

I write about life and about books—ideally both at the same time. I write essays, book reviews, and experimental nonfiction. I’m working on a memoir, represented by Elias Altman, Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents. This 2024, I’m serving as the associate editor for nonfiction at the Exposition Review, a literary magazine. In my work life, I’m a full-time corporate copywriter at Wells Fargo. I ride a bicycle to work, even though I live in Los Angeles.

Here is my archive.

 

2024

“Prozac Nation, Revisited.” Essay in Hobart.

“This is California, too.” Mystery-essay in Press Pause, vol. 9

“Lithium is the new gold.” Fiction-essay in Across the Margin.

Coming soon: “Cosplay capitalism: From Palo Alto to Silicon Allee.” Book-review-essay, in The European Review of Books.

In 2024, I was an official artist at the Bombay Beach Biennale in the Coachella valley, where I performed Nonfiction Circle. I conceived, wrote, and created a piece of extremely site-specific nonfiction, and read it to a live audience, all in the same day. It was like a desert sand dune: formed today, gone tomorrow.

2023

“Dysmorphia, ‘degenerate’ art, and the dormancy of toxic thoughts.” Book-review-essay in The Smart Set.

“A murky unlearning: Sophocles and the Greek art of Failure.” Chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory.

2022

“Delia Derbyshire, or the queen of electronic music.” On Re-Sisters by Cosey Fanni Tutti. Book review in Louder Than War.

“We were all Nobody once.” On the life, work, and memoirs of classicist E.R. Dodds. Book review in The Classical Review.

2019

Book: Classical Literature and Posthumanism, a collection of reference essays. Bloomsbury, 480pp.

Essay: “Theoretical introduction: the subject of the human,” co-written with Giulia Maria Chesi

Essay: “Malfunctions of Embodiment: Man/Weapon Agency and the Greek Ideology of Masculinity.” 

Translation: “How to Become a Cyborg.”  Bloomsbury.

Review: Feminist clowns and fairy tale in Bait: Kill the Princess. In Broadway Baby.

Review: Butch Princesa by Andrea Spisto. In Broadway Baby.

2018

Book review: Objects in ancient Greek theater. In Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

2017

Film review: the tragedy of reality TV fame. Mia Spengler’s film drama Back for Good at the Berlin Film Festival.

Film review. Discreet, Travis Matthews’ ballad to gay Texans (Berlin Film Festival)

Golden Exits fails to glisten at the 2017 Berlinale.

2016

Dissertation: Ph.D. thesis on the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles. Exclusion in Sophocles.

Essay: “Not even his dead body: Polyneices, the excluded brother.” in Occupy Antigone. Peter Narr Press.

Poem: “Saint Giles.” in Poetry Nights III – an anthology, published and edited by The Soho Society Club.

2015

Book review: On family secrets, and the millennial London bedsit life. Kat Gordon, The Artificial Anatomy of Parks.

Book review: Millennial admin temp life in Alice Furse’s office novel, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

Interview: Biographer Clifford Slapper on the life of Mike Garson. Bowie’s Piano Man.

Book review: The Berlin Diaries by Noel Maurice. Remembrance of the 1990s.

2014

Interview: Lauren Oyler on writing Berlin.

Book review: A 1970s childhood in Thatcher’s Britain. Springfield Road by Salena Godden.

2013

Essay: “‘Our Mind Is the Ancient Proteus’: Proust, the Poets, and the Sea.” in the collection: Transformative Change in Western Thought: Metamorphosis from Homer to Hollywood. Routledge.

2012

Book review: on staged murders and narrated deaths in Greek tragedy. Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

2011

Book review: War in Words: Transformations of War from Antiquity to Clausewitz. For the Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

Essay: on Marcel Proust in faux-Pompeii. “In Search of Lost Time and Pompeii.” Oxford University Press.

Greek lyric arrangement: Brian Elias’ Electra Mourns–premiered at BBC Proms, 2012

2009

Translation: “Books and Literacy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies.

 

Other work (partial list)

Performance
  • In 2024, I’m in the core team developing Calypso at the Beauty Salon, a poetic new play adaptation of Odyssey 5 (CalArts REEF residencies).
  • In 2023, I was an artist in residence at the Catwalk Art Institute with my 4-woman Queen for a Day theater lab. Queen for a Day was a 1950s game show where ordinary housewives competed over which of them had the most tragic and difficult life. Audiences would vote a “winner” by applause-o-meter, who would then receive a shower of (sponsored) gifts. Sounds pretty gnarly, right? 
  • Reading and storytelling at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe festival.
  • At Betonest artist residency in 2018, I developed the multimedia poem Looking for Heat in collaboration with performance artist Lady Gaby. 
  • In 2017, I wrote and performed a cycle of songs about St Giles, the saint of lepers (I did!).
  • Used experimental “living room theater” settings to stage my first own play Freud’s Taboo (2010).
  • Directed the KCL Greek play in 2006, Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae (Women Take Power)
Editing
  • In 2023-2024, I’m an Associate Editor at Los Angeles based literary magazine Exposition Review.
  • Between 2016 and 2019, I reviewed book proposals for Bloomsbury Academic, in my fields of expertise, ancient Greek literature and modern literary theory.
  • In 2014-16, I was the inaugural Literary Editor of Indierepublik, covering a fast-growing scene of anglophone poets and writers in the German capital. 
  • While at Yale, I was Nonfiction Editor of  Palimpsest, the literary and arts magazine. 

Bio

I was born in Berlin, Germany, and studied Classics in London and at Yale. I worked a few years in London, then wrote my PhD on the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles, back in Berlin. I taught in the Classics department of Humboldt University, a place filled with the bronze busts, portraits and figureheads of great classical linguists and historians; I also taught at the center for Gender studies.

But something pulled me to Finance—maybe it was London, where the financial services industry breathes its influence into every last corner of every little street. So I first joined a venture capital firm, where I did Press, and worked with financial journalists. Then, I moved to California, where currently I’m a corporate writer at Wells Fargo, the bank that began as a stagecoach hauling gold in the Old West.

I’m always scribbling at some book review, essay, literary concept art or experimental hybrid work. I collect and curate the best stranger-than-fiction nonfiction in my newsletter, The Glossy Ruin Quarterly

Glossy Ruin Quarterly

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