Publications
"Winter, 1946" Poem; Tar River Poetry; Forthcoming
“Cigarettes” One-Sentence Story; Monkey Bicycle, published May 2016
“The Nest of His Love” Vignettes; Flapperhouse, published Jan 2016
“The Distance Between My Wives” Short Story; Gravel, published Dec 2013
“Toy Soldiers” Poem; This Great Society, published Sep 2012
“Playlist to a NightLife” Poem; Open Ear of the Universe, published Feb 2012
“Re-creating Mankind: The Philosophy and Creation of the New Soviet Man” Essay; UNT Eagle Feather, published Apr 2012
Credited Editor, "Popular Perceptions of Soviet Politics in the 1920s: Disenchantment of the Dreamers" by Olga Velikanova, published in 2013
Screenwriting
Rat’s Tale (120pgs)
Rat’s Tale mixes the high-school angst of Booksmart or Ghost World with the whimsical and frenetic feelings of Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep (complete with surreal, literary-infused dream sequences). This coming-of-age story focuses on Ricky, a teenage loner who can’t live down his childhood appearance in his father’s infamous local pest-control ads. Ricky’s outcast status is interrupted by the arrival VK, a new student who shares Ricky’s penchant for wordplay, witticisms, and general nonconformity. They connect and lose themselves in their young romance. All is well until VK develops a close relationship with Ricky’s only other confidant, his English teacher. His jealousy and misanthropy pushes his dream girl away, and Ricky must muster the courage to shirk his loner wolf mentality or risk losing her for good.
Won or Placed in the following:
Dallas International Film Festival Screenwriting Competition (2021)
Los Angeles International Screenplay Awards (2021)
Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship (2021)
Inroads Screenwriting Fellowship (2021)
SuspenseTV (98pgs)
SuspenseTV is a winding, non-linear narrative that mixes the studio chatter of Network with the guns-drawn standoffs of Reservoir Dogs. Beverly is a middle-aged woman whose family was brutally murdered in a robbery when she was a girl. She copes with the residual effects of the crime by binge-watching true-crime television and takes extra pleasure in the criminals being caught. Hen Bragg is a lifelong criminal who commits the murders and gets away, only to use his haul to indulge his own love for murder-mystery pulp. Their stories are being investigated by both Detective Lawton, an aging cop who goes beyond the law to try and catch Hen, and a production crew at the immensely popular SuspenseTV. In their search for realistic and engaging material, the production crew finds Bevs case and ultimately brings all the players together for one final confrontation.
Won or Placed in the following:
Los Angeles International Screenplay Awards (2021)
Screencraft Screenwriting Fellowship (2021)
Emerging Screenwriters Genre Screenplay Competition, Crime/Thiller (2021)
Midnight Tonight (107pgs)
Midnight Tonight blends the classic tale ofFrankenstein with the supernatural dread of Hereditary. This surreal psychological horror story follows a couple confronting the terrifying boundary between life and death. Veronique Danse is consumed by grief after the death of Tugboat, her beloved dog, and soon begins seeing him—and other dead things—everywhere she goes. Her husband Greg, a forensic anthropologist who has devoted his life to understanding death through science, dismisses her experiences as grief while secretly struggling with the same haunting visions. As Veronique becomes increasingly convinced that the dead are reaching back into the living world, Greg's rational worldview begins to collapse, forcing them both to confront a terrifying possibility: death may not be the end, but a threshold that can be crossed—and once crossed, it may be impossible to return.
Nixon Van Buren (108pgs)
Nixon Van Buren is a criminal farce in the vein of Coen Brothers films like Fargo or Raising Arizona. This off-beat cat-and-mouse film follows Nixon Van Buren, a scheming, silver-tongued financial planner whose borrowing and scamming has finally caught up with him. In need of an escape--from his job, from the loan-sharks who he owes, and from his beagle-obsessed wife--Nixon coerces a huge sum of money from his elderly neighbor and takes off to Mexico in order to fake his own death. On his heels are the grisly debt collectors who want to break his knees, an FBI agent, and an insurance adjuster who specializes in pseudocide. They track Nixon across the Mexican border while he drinks tequila, dances to mariachi, and exhumes a corpse to play off as his own. The orchestration of Nixon’s cons continues to grow until it becomes untenable, forcing him to finally decide what he’s willing to sacrifice for his freedom.