Essays & Stories
PERSONAL ESSAYS
A Home for Vagrant Animals (Agni)
An exploration of what is “natural,” infertility, IVF, and animals infesting my house.
Adventuring with my Disabled Mom Healed me Too (Outside)
After my mom suffered a massive stroke that left half of her body paralyzed, my family and I decided to create adventures where none seemed possible.
After Losing My Mom, I didn’t Know How to Be a Bride (Glamour)
The complications of becoming a bride without my feminist, non-traditional mom to guide my way.
A Year in Africa Peeling Oranges (Atticus Reviews)
Reflections on my year in Ghana, at 19, when I believed enough of my love could save anything. That saving was required.
The Blind Prophets of Easter Island (Brevity)
What watching Jacques Cousteau taught me while holding my boyfriend’s baby.
The Gators Have Turned
A boat ride with gators through the swamp, a reckoning with the fantasies we invent in the face of tragedy
Seneca Review (print only)
In the Midst of a Public Catastrophe, I was in My Own Private Disaster (Electric Literature)
My community came together after a tornado in Tuscaloosa, but my private grief was isolating.
ESSAYS ON READING & WRITING
‘This World Doesn’t Exist. We don’t Live there.’
An essay about Tessa’s research for “The Red Grove, and the dozens of women I asked to imagine how their lives might be different without the possibility of violence.
People
Who Will Finish Your Manuscript When You Die?
The story of “The Finishers,” Tessa’s writing group who have pledged to write one another’s unfinished manuscripts when they die.
Lithub
What to read when you Want to Run Away with the Circus
Reading recommendations for preparing yourself to flee.
The Rumpus
The Poet Who Taught the Serious Girl to Cut the Sun
A love letter to the first writer Tessa fell madly in love with.
FSG Works in Progress
Reading the Margins: on Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor
On encountering a heavily annotated copy of Sontag’s cancer book a few years after my own cancer experience, and what it taught me about the margins.
FSG Works in Progress
A Queer, Biracial Coming-of-Age Memoir is Equal Parts Pain and Pleasure
Tessa’s New York Times book review of “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls” by T Kira Madden.
The New York Times
OBSESSIVE, RESEARCHED ESSAYS
How the Coney Island Saved Thousands of Babies (Lithub)
Premature babies were expected to die. Then, a sideshow showman invented the incubator to display the world’s tiniest people.
The Histories of Jacques Cousteau: a Fairytale of the Drowned (Creative Nonfiction)
Born from my obsession with Jacques Cousteau, a quest to piece together mythic episodes from his life.
A Record of Your Body Over Time (Brick)
An investigation of the myriad and wild ways women’s hair has been used in art, as tools, and as a final remembrance of those gone.
The Phone of the Wind (The Believer)
A pilgrimage to Japan to meet the man who built a phone to talk to the dead. And, a chat on that phone.
After Seeing (Wildsam)
An essay in Wildsam’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park Field Guide, about how a head injury altered my vision, allowing me to finally see in new ways.
SHORT FICTION
Starbaby Blooms a Tuber Rose
New Orleans Review
Choose Your Own Adventure: By Ship into the Water
The Normal School
Monsters
Used Furniture Review
Word Problems
Arcadia Magazine
(print only)
Greed, Music, Viscera: Four Windows
The Diagram
EXCERPTS FROM THE ELECTRIC WOMAN
Published in Earlier Iterations
