New Projects

A Thing of Beauty: Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire. (Proposal, Introduction, and Ch. 1, “‘Without the Muffle:’ Byron, Boxing, and Authentic Life,” completed.)

Novel in progress (third draft): The Drench, a feminist historical-thriller update of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which a medical student named Josephine and her alter ego track the Whitechapel killer of 1888.

Further down the road, a nonfiction book with a title from Elizabeth Spencer: A Second Country: Southern Writers in Italy, 1945-1985 (Elizabeth Spencer, Ralph Ellison, William Styron, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, Eugene Walter, William Demby, William Weaver, Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate.)

Novels-currently-in-lots-of-notes-and-draft-bits form: one inspired by Vita Sackville-West and Knole House in Kent, and one by what climate crisis might do to an Alabama farm.

And in life:

(Mavis Staples, “This Little Light,” from Hope at the Hideout: Live, 2008.)