Published work

“Strangers: Cricket and the Passage of Time”— creative nonfiction, Vagabond City Lit, 2022

“After the Last Midtown Show” — journalistic first-person narrative, The Alternative, 2022

Debut novel: An Unspectacular Crisis

Mae Swarz, twenty, is a compulsive liar and budding but reluctant Chicago vocalist whose mother’s mysterious prior life is starting to loom dangerously large over her own. Coerced into recording a studio album by entertainment lawyer Robert Koenid, Mae is forced to choose whether to pursue a singing career for influence, even fame — or for music’s intrinsic value, all while she crests adulthood with her independence at stake.

A few blocks away, Ajay Chadhana is offered a rare opportunity: skip a step in the software project management career he’s been building since his immigration from India... at the cost of severely hardening his heart. As he approaches thirty, Ajay must draw a line between the trappings of humorously banal corporate life, and his nighttime life as a session drummer — a crisis of sustainable self-care versus ambition and what it takes to survive in the U.S. in February 2024.

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A work of upmarket fiction, An Unspectacular Crisis includes five narrative perspectives, several short teleplays, one confessional email, and one heartwrenching online encyclopedia page. The novel reflects professional developmental editing and more than two years’ obsessive labor.