"I wanted to teach this course because of the persistent swerve I’ve found in my own writing to confront my fears through humor. Over time, I’ve learned not to censor myself when an apparently serious subject drives me to make jokes. The story I’ve linked to above came from an editor’s invitation to participate in a book of rebooted adventure stories. I’d read the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan tales as kid, but revisiting that 19th-century sensibility in 2018 was painful, and I couldn’t wrap my head around trying to inhabit that world view. I thought I’d have to drop out of the project until suddenly, during an in-class writing session at Stanford, I discovered a framework that let me riff on the aspects of Tarzan that had upset me so much.

"My comic writing has appeared in places such as Booth, Barrelhouse, Catamaran, Miracle Monocle, and the anthologies Winesburg, Indiana and the above-mentioned My Name Was Never Frankenstein. My serious fiction has been published in Glimmer Train, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, Colorado Review, Best New American Voices, and elsewhere. I’m a former Stegner Fellow and current Jones Lecturer at Stanford, and my work has been supported by the MacDowell and Yaddo artist colonies, the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers conferences, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. I hold an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston."