I am a novelist.

My debut, Green (Random House, 2018), won the American Library Association’s Alex Award, was named “One of the Books We Loved in 2018” by the New Yorker, and was a New York Times Editors’ Pick.

My nonfiction writing has been praised by the Wall Street Journal and has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, The Nation, and elsewhere. I also teach creative writing at Columbia and Catapult in New York City.

In an other life, I was the chief blogger on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. For a few surreal years after Obama won, I traveled all around the world giving speeches about my experiences on the campaign, the power of storytelling as an organizing tool, and the digital grassroots revolution.

I was born and raised in Boston and now live in Maplewood, NJ with my wife, Sasha, son, Lev, and daughter, Misa. For my day job, I work in Newark, running the Philip Roth Personal Library, where I host the “Roth and Company” podcast.

My enthusiasms include: public pull-up bars, National Parks, podcasts about people who are very different from me (like Navy SEALs and chill Buddhists), Thoreauvian simplicity, Falstaffian excess, spontaneous rap, and Borscht Belt humor. Roth summed it up best: “Sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness are my closest friends.”