I think the title really says it all, don’t you? That’s my name. I’m originally from what used to be a very, very small town west of Austin called Dripping Springs, Texas. I lived in Birmingham, Alabama for about five years before coming to SDSU to start my MFA in 2023.

That’s me showing you what the bottom of Bridalveil Fall looks like. I go outside a lot.

I’ve done a number of things with my life. I used to build vintage Harley-Davidsons for a living. I still build them for fun. I ride them all over and sometimes fix them in motel rooms when they break down. I used to be homeless, living in a motorcycle shop called The Dojo. I used to clean septic tanks and grease traps. I used to work the door at a bar at the gnarliest intersection in Birmingham. I used to be an international terrorist of sorts. I used to, and still do, run an annual zine called Locating Troubles with my good photographer pal Liam. But I have always really been obsessed with the written word regardless of what I was doing with my life.

My mother read to me every night when I was a child. Maybe until I was twelve. I can still remember the first book I read and how proud I was: The Berenstein Bears on the Moon (Not Berenstain. I don’t care what they say). I wrote books for school projects and printed them out and illustrated them and bound them in elementary school. Something about the tangible book will always outweigh the worth of the digital book. Every time I publish in print there is a feeling of satisfaction that publishing online will never bring.

After I graduated from Texas State, I traveled to Rojava Kurdistan (Northeastern Syria), and I volunteered as an international member of a Kurdish militia called the YPG. I brought some physical books with me. I had a number to call when I landed in Iraq. I used a copy of The Grapes of Wrath, and I underlined the first time each digit of the phone number appeared in the book to record the name of a contact I was supposed to call who would smuggle me across the Iraqi-Syrian border of Kurdistan. That way, just in case I was detained and searched, it would be harder for them to find or notice any incriminating information on me or the people I was joining. Here I am reading that copy, with its page edges ~*tactically*~ blacked out, near a village called Qereçox.

I later volunteered in Ukraine after the Russian invasion in 2022, and books, physical books, were precious treasure in both places. Kurmanji was a forbidden language in Syria from the rise of Arab nationalism until early this year (2025, yes, really), and in all my time there and to this date I have only ever seen three books printed in the Kurdish language. In Ukraine the thought of printed matter being in Ukrainian was an abomination until Taras Shevchenko rebelled against Russian nationalism by daring to write in Ukrainian and about Ukraine in the nineteenth century.

We used to gather at the internet cafe to pirate books from Library Genesis that we downloaded on our phones. I read War and Peace off my phone in the span of a week this way. There’s a lot of free time in a war. We had a very modest library of printed material in Syria: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, To Have and Have Not, The Man in the High Castle with the first 18 pages torn out, Marx’s Kapital, Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, Let it Come Down by Paul Bowles, to name the ones I can remember off the top of my head. We devoured those, and any time a new international would come to join us, one of the first questions we’d ask was, “Did you bring any books?”

I’m very excited to take this class and learn more about the history of the book as an object, what makes it so special, how they have been created, what it has meant to so many people, and what it will continue to mean.