Forthcoming

Both Sides of Now: A Listening Room

Both Sides of Now: A Listening Room

Both Sides of Now: A Listening Room is a work of literary nonfiction drawn from more than six decades of lived experience and a 280-kilometer walk from Porto, Portugal, to Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Listening provides the book’s organizing practice as childhood, violence, the body, institutional rooms, years spent alongside children who experienced commercial sexual exploitation and survivors of human trafficking, and the Camino enter the work without being arranged into a conventional chronology or narrative of resolution.

Original line drawings, white space, silence, and page turns are integral to the reading experience.

The book opens with “Love Notes for the Jagged Path,” an invocation by North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green. An afterword, “The Pages Are Listening,” by Joseph W. Calvo closes the book by listening back to the practice that shaped its pages.

Forthcoming 2027

Nothing Left to Prove

Who do we become when there is nothing left to prove?

Both Sides of Now invites us to listen.
Nothing Left to Prove came from what I heard.

Among what I heard was a song.

Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around carried images that remained with me long after the music ended: resistance, readiness, reckoning, surrender.

I did not set out to answer it.
I listened to what it opened.

These pages came from there.

They are a listening.

Moving through the body, memory, truth, and what we carry when nothing asks to be proven, Nothing Left to Prove invites us to sit with the questions that remain when the noise empties out.

You need not have entered the Listening Room before.

No agreement.
No evidence of having arrived.
Only a willingness to stand beside what is true.

Nothing here asks to be proven.

Neither do you.

Forthcoming 2027