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1854: Federal troops occupy Boston to send a fugitive slave back to slavery

In September 2025, Milkweed Editions brought out my edited volume, The Essays of Henry David Thoreau. The angriest essay in that collection is “Slavery in Massachusetts,” a cry of protest against the rendition of a fugitive slave and against Thoreau’s fellow citizens who supported it.

In 2026, building on Thoreau, I wrote an essay that sketches the methods and fate of abolitionist resistance to slavery and uses that history to examine present day resistance to the Trump administration’s deportation of undocumented immigrants. Liberties quarterly accepted the essay for its Summer 2026 issue.

A fossil butterfly from the Eocene, 34 million years ago

In 2023 I was commissioned by Harper’s Magazine to write an essay about butterflies, the climate crisis and deep time. It appeared in the July 2025 issue.

Nabokov’s drawing of the wings of the “Karner Blue” (P. melissa samuelis)

In 2021 – 2022 I was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, studying the library’s wonderful collection of manuscripts from both Henry David Thoreau and Vladimir Nabokov, all the while working on essays of my own about searching for butterflies and, more broadly, on questions of why we go to nature and what we look for there. 

Beginning in the fall of 2020, I worked as one of the curators preparing for the 2022 opening of the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Center houses and exhibits more than 100,000 exclusive cultural treasures created and owned by Dylan over seven decades, including original manuscripts, unreleased recordings, unseen film performances, photos and more. 

My curatorial work focused mainly on the Center’s second floor Parker Brothers Gallery, designed to explore the creative process through ongoing exhibits of the work of other artists.