Ghosts in the Museum is a memoir, told through a series of linked essays, that focuses on the ways in which we curate and understand our lives through the objects that surround us. I examine how everyday objects can transmogrify into valuable artifacts and magical totems through the act of our attention and mythmaking. Our material culture is imbued with the meaning we give it, and as the art historian Glenn Adamson accurately writes in his book Fewer, Better Things, “a single thing may carry hundreds of stories about the people who made it or who have lived with it.”

This book begins with the discovery of a suitcase that belonged to my late father. The objects and letters stored inside reveal clues to a hidden history: my grandmother’s mysterious suicide at the age of 48, and the secreted past of my father’s family.  These items also help me to understand the foundations of my parent's fraught marriage, particularly my mother's untreated mental illness.

As I attempted to uncover the truth of my family’s past through these objects, I found myself unable to confront my story head on. So I turned to the stories of other relics—a pair of ruby slippers from the movie “The Wizard of Oz” that were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Minnesota; a collection of vintage dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee depicting death scenes; an ancient palimpsest at the Walters Art Museum—and these objects helped enlighten my personal journey. 

Part memoir, part detective story, part social history, this book uses the few objects I have from my father as the locus for an exploration into the nature of objects, inheritance, family history, and the consequences that long-held secrets and trauma can have across generations. At its core, Ghosts in the Museum is a study of the narratives that we create about our lives and the objects that we choose to contain these stories. And how, when personal truths are inscrutable, we can place our intangible hopes and desires into a tangible proxy in an effort to better understand the arc of a human life.

Essays included in this memoir have earned numerous awards as well as recognition in Best American Essays. 

In the 1930s and ‘40s, when New York was little more than a textile warehouse copying the designs out of Paris, Claire McCardell dared to create clothes for American women and become one of the first to get her name on her own label. Claire eschewed the male-dominated vision of fashion at a time when Paris and haute couture ruled the global marketplace, in order to create clothes that fit women’s bodies as well as their mounting ambitions. She tossed out corsets and crinoline and girdles in favor of a casual, confident look that was equally refined and relaxed. She sewed real pockets into her dresses because, as she once said: “men are free from the clothes problem — why should I not follow their example?”
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In the process, Claire designed iconic American sportswear that remains a staple of our wardrobes today, from ballet flats and leggings to separates and wrap dresses. Claire continues to inspire designers from Michael Kors to Isaac Mizrahi to Anna Sui, the later who told me that Claire is timeless for the way she modernized how women dress.

Claire was born in Frederick, Maryland, and her personal archive is housed at the Maryland Center for History and Culture. In 2018, I delved into that archive, and others, for an essay about her work that was published in The Washington Post Magazine.

Now, I'm writing a book about Claire for Simon & Schuster, due out in the spring of 2025.Unhemmed is the story of Claire, but it is also a story about our bodies and our rights to choose how to dress, which is a sartorial symbol of our right to choose how we live. Claire once said: “It wasn’t me in the clothes, or just wearing them, that interested me, it was the clothes in relation to me — how changed I felt once in them.” Claire's creations contained an alchemy that so many of us still seek: the ability to command the narrative of our own bodies, and to be seen not as mere eye candy or reproductive vessels, but as a person to be reckoned with.

For over two decades, I have written about architecture, design, cities, and culture for magazines. Some initially see this as a narrow speciality. I see it as a window into the very thinking of humankind. What we build speaks volumes about who we are as a culture.

My work has illuminated the often overlooked history of restricted covenants and redlining; the ways in which building design is harnessed against women trying to access reproductive health; the power of race and gender in architecture; the role of defensive design in disenfranchising certain communities. 

My articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Slate, Metropolis, Curbed, CityLab, Design Observer, and Fast Company’s CoDesign, among many others. I was a contributing editor with Architect magazine for more than a decade, and have been an editor with Fast Company, Metropolis, and Next City. From 2004-2007, I was editor-in-chief of Baltimore's Urbanite magazine. I have won numberous awards for my writing about architecture and design, including, most recently, a 2022 Architectural Journalism Award from the American Insitute of Architects, Baltimore Chapter.

My short stories have published in places like McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Southern Review, PANK, TriQuarterly Review, Revolver, Post Road, and The Little Patuxent Review and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. My short story “A Modern Girl’s Guide to Childbirth” was selected by Roxane Gay as one of the  2015 Wigleaf Top 50 (very) Short Fiction winners and I have twice earned the Maryland State Arts Council's Independent Artist Award for my fiction.  

Over the years, I have read my writing in front of live audiences and on podcasts, and I've been interviewed  about stories that I have written and the craft of writing. Here is a sampling of readings, interviews, and craft essays, which have been featured in places like Harper's magazine, The Southern Review, and PANK.

I have interviewed and profiled many different artists as a way to catalogue their creative work. The subjects of my writing range from  bestselling writer Neil Gaiman, to the pioneering jewelry designer Betty Cooke, to graphic designer Ellen Lupton, to a cohort of comic book illustrators who stage "art fights" live. Here are a few of these profiles.

Writing and the creation of art do not happen in isolation. The vibrancy of a city is fueled by its diversity of voices and by the creative exchange of ideas. An important aspect of my writing life is building and sustaining the community of artists, editors, and aspiring writers who live in and around Baltimore.  I have taught community writing courses, volunteered in Baltimore City Public Schools, organized readings and literary events, and served as a moderator and a host for visiting authors and artists. Just a few of the venues and organizations through which I  have done this work include The Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore CityLit, The Ivy Bookshop, and The Baldwin Prize, an essay competition founded by Lionel Foster for students at Baltimore City College High School.

I had the great honor of earning the Mary Sawyers Baker Prize for the Literary Arts in 2017, and the effect that the Baker has had on my work is immeasurable. In the years since, the memoir that I talked about in my Baker awards video has evolved into the memoir-in-essays that I am completing now.  The support and artistic freedom offered by this award supported the creative evolution of this writing, and I am forever grateful.

Here is the video created after I won that year's prize for the Literary Arts. Please take care: this video mentions the subject of suicide.

I've had the great fortune of assisting on projects and collaborating with other writers, artists, designers, nonprofit organizations, and creators to develop, edit, and write a variety of projects, from articles in our local BMore Art Magazine to nonfiction books about topics like design thinking and neuroaesthetics. Here are a few examples of this work.