Books
Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads (2026)
How do you sing about the end of the world? This is a question the American songwriter Woody Guthrie asked after witnessing the sky turn dark with dust on what became known as Black Sunday on April 14, 1935. The album he made five years later, Dust Bowl Ballads, grapples with survival when ecological collapse, forced migration, police brutality, and state-sanctioned violence are cutting down every hope. In Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads—my new book for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series—I explore why this album is essential listening now, and how folk music of the 1940s has been under-appreciated for its radical legacy. While many people are familiar with Guthrie’s anthemic “This Land Is Your Land,” there is much more to appreciate in his musical impact. The book is out November 12, 2026, preorder it here.
Concrete New York (2026)
Concrete New York, published by Blue Crow Media, surveys over 50 concrete and Brutalist buildings across the five boroughs. I authored and researched its text and Jason R. Woods took its striking black-and-white photographs. There are internationally recognized landmarks like the TWA Flight Center and Marcel Breuer’s former Whitney Museum, as well as under-appreciated structures like churches, housing, libraries, infrastructure, and universities. UK orders here, US orders here.
An Opinionated Guide to New York Architecture (2026)
I authored An Opinionated Guide to New York Architecture for the wonderful Hoxton Mini Press, with write-ups on over 70 sites that I think represent the diverse history of local design. Icons like the Chrysler Building and Guggenheim Museum are here, and so are the surviving houses of the 19th-century Black community Weeksville and the hulking fortifications of Staten Island’s Battery Weed. The book also has walking tours I designed to take you on journeys through themes like immigration and modernism. UK orders here, US orders here.
Grave (2023)
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. My book Grave (2023) takes a ground-level view of how burial sites have transformed over time and how they continue to change. As a cemetery tour guide, I have spent more time walking among tombstones than most. Even for me, the grave has largely been invisible, an out of the way and unobtrusive marker of death. However, graves turn out to be not always so subtle, reverent, or permanent.
Press: BBC, WNYC, Late Night Live on ABC, New Books Network, Funeral Service Insider, The Christian Century
Maps
Women’s History New York Map (2026)
The fifth map I edited and authored for Blue Crow Media was released in the spring of 2026 and highlights the contributions of women to New York City. The Women’s History New York Map covers all five boroughs in spotlighting sites that honor suffragists, artists, reformers, activists, and more. It’s illustrated with fantastic photography by Anna Morgowicz.
Modernist New York Map (2025)
My fourth map edited and authored for Blue Crow Media was released in summer of 2025! Modernist New York guides you to over 50 sites across the five boroughs, from sleek skyscrapers to futuristic churches, and has beautiful photographs by Jason Woods.
Great Trees of New York Map
I edited and authored the Great Trees of New York Map (2021) for Blue Crow Media. The fold-out publication features 50 of the oldest, rarest, strangest, and most historic trees across New York City’s five boroughs. Original photographs by Colin Montgomery join my descriptions and essay.
Press: Hyperallergic, We Heart, Untapped Cities
Concrete New York Map
I edited and authored the Concrete New York Map (2017) for Blue Crow Media. It features 50 sites of concrete architecture in New York City, dating from the 1870s to the present. Photographs by Jason Woods illustrate the printed map.
Press:
New York Times, Fast Company,The Architect’s Newspaper, Telegraph, Architectural Digest, Curbed, ArchDaily, Untapped Cities
Art Deco New York Map
I edited and authored the Art Deco New York Map (2018) for Blue Crow Media. It features 50 sites of Art Deco architecture in New York City, from icons like the Chrysler Building to abandoned structures on an off-limits island. Photographs by Jason Woods illustrate the printed map.
Press: ArchDaily, We Heart, Curbed, Untapped Cities
Essays for Books & Catalogues
Architecture of Doom
Some buildings evoke dread, haunt us as phantoms of what might have been, or have uncanny angles and passageways that give us a visceral unease. I wrote the introductory essay on Hoxton Mini Press’s 2026 Architecture of Doom photography book, meditating on why some buildings unsettle.
Brooklyn Arcadia: Art, History, and Nature at Majestic Green-Wood
I wrote four essays for Brooklyn Arcadia: Art, History, and Nature at Majestic Green-Wood, a photography book published in 2023 by Rizzoli on the 19th-century New York City cemetery. My essays examine the cemetery in winter, metalwork and stone carving, trees, and the feeling of being in a place of the dead in the dark of night.
Wildflowers of New York City
I contributed an introductory essay to Wildflowers of New York City, a photography book by Andrew Garn that was published by Cornell University Press in 2021. It explores over 2,000 wildflowers that flourish around the five boroughs.
Midwest Architecture Journeys
I contributed an essay on architect Bruce Goff and his fantastic futuristic architecture to Midwest Architecture Journeys, out October 2019 from Belt Publishing. The book explores the architecture of the Midwest United States through essays by architects, critics, and journalists.
Vestiges & Verse
I contributed an essay on the enigmatic artist James Edward Deeds, Jr. for the catalogue for Vestiges & Verse: Notes from the Newfangled Epic (January 21, 2018–May 27, 2018) at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. The exhibition featured 21 self-taught artists who worked with narrative.
The Public Domain Review: Selected Essays, Vol. VI
The Public Domain Review: Selected Essays, Vol. VI (2019) includes my essay “Illustrating Carnival: Remembering the Overlooked Artists Behind Early Mardi Gras.” It also features writing on dancing plagues, mesmeric frenzies, blazing worlds, prophetic witches, medieval toys, and perfect elephants.
The Public Domain Review: Selected Essays
My essay on the 19th-century photographs taken by Félix Nadar in the Paris catacombs is in The Public Domain Review: Selected Essays, Vol. VII. (2020). The compendium also features tales of imperialist board games, serpentine dances, socialist utopias, and pre-Raphaelite wombats.
The Mystical Drawings of George M. Silsbee
I wrote an essay on the extraordinary charts by 19th-century Masonic artist George M. Silsbee for their first public exhibition in 2021 in Explanatory Marks Ricco/Maresca in Chelsea.
Zines
Manhole Covers: The World Underfoot
I started photographing manhole covers while traveling in Cairo in 2017 and have been exploring them around the world ever since. This small publication brings together those photos and my writing on the cultural, artistic, and even criminal connections the covers have to our cities with art by Melbourne-based illustrator Bronwyn Hazelwood to celebrate the humble joy of utilitarian design.
Cooking with the Dead
This illustrated zine compiles—and tries out!—recipes left on tombstones around the world. It was a collaboration with illustrator Bronwyn Hazelwood and writer Claire Voon.
Press: New York Times, Tasting Table, Reforma
Follow Me: Angel Guides of the Victorian Cemetery
This zine of my photographs of guiding cemetery angels is based on a 2018 essay I wrote for the Offing. It looks particularly at how these tombs depict Victorian women and children who often died in the complications of childbirth when pregnancy was not a choice.
The Cemetery Language of Flowers Zine
The Cemetery Language of Flowers zine is a 28-page publication on the floral symbolism you are likely to find on tombstones, from snapped roses to lilies.
Some New York City Epitaphs Zine
Some New York City Epitaphs is a compact collection of the messages left on the tombstones of the famous, ordinary, and unknown of New York City.
Cemetery Symbols Zine
Created with illustrator Bronwyn Hazelwood, the Cemetery Symbols zine features 20 pages of some of the most common gravestone symbols.