Who I am:

I am Associate Professor of creative writing and literature at Salisbury University. As a fiction writer, essayist, and scholar of folklore, I blend creative and critical practices, specializing in experimental prose narrative and cultural history. I am the author of two short story collections, Salt Folk and The Science of Lost Futures. My scholarly work examines the uses, abuses, adaptations, and recycling of oral narratives in global cultures with an emphasis on the social politics of fairy-tales and the cultural history of the grotesque and monstrous in transnational literature and film.

My Fulbright grant focuses on:

My creative work straddles the blurred boundaries between facts and fictions. My Fulbright project entails researching and writing a surreal, semi-biographical novel of my great-grandfather’s experience on the Eastern Front during WWI, told through the artifacts and heirlooms he left behind after his death. Using photos, maps, and other archival miscellany, the novel explores the tension between biographical reality and fantasy at the intersections of cultural history and personal genealogy. As a companion to the novel, I’ll be working with local Polish artists in Gdańsk to curate a micro-folk-art museum of objects based on my great-grandfather’s counterfactual oral history. I’ll also be teaching a course on “Facts, Fictions & Folklores: Post-Truth and the Literary Imagination” that explores the dynamic cultural relationships between the philosophical concept of post-truth, literature, and contemporary global politics.

I decided to apply for a Fulbright grant because:

I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity for cross-cultural collaboration on a Fulbright since I was an undergrad. Poland felt like a natural fit. Avant-garde Polish literature has been fundamental to my development as a writer. Jan Potacki, Bruno Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz, Stanislaw Lem, Olga Tokarczuk—these are all writers who made me want to be a writer. I love Poland’s rich history of folklore that animates my imagination and I’ve long wanted to pay homage to that artistic kinship. Perhaps most importantly, I chose Poland because Gdańsk is the crucial setting for my book project. I fell in love with the city when I visited a few years ago. That’s when I learned how it was bombed during the war and reduced to rubble before being rebuilt from the ashes, so it is an artifact that embodies the tension within the book of fact and fiction in historical memory. The immersive experience of the Fulbright will allow me to wander the streets, soak up the environment, interact with locals, visit museum archives, and bring the book to life.

After completing my Fulbright grant I would like to:

Once the Fulbright is over, I’ll finish my manuscript and continue to collaborate with Polish colleagues. I’ve previously taught short-term study abroad courses in Scotland and Spain and hope to establish reciprocal exchanges between Salisbury University and the University of Gdansk. My academic dream is to start a literary press at my university focused on books in translation. There’s such dearth of global literature translated into English in the U.S.—less than 3% total, and less than 1% is fiction and poetry. I’m already making plans to organize a student-staffed teaching press at my home institution where students earn experimental internship course credit and professionalize in editing, graphic design, and marketing. Through the Fulbright, I’m hoping to create partnerships with translators abroad with a goal of establishing a press to bring more contemporary Polish—and other—literature to the anglophone literary landscape.