I'm a writer, teacher, and scholar of myth and story. I'm currently a Professor of English at Mount Saint Mary's University in Los Angeles, where I teach U.S. literature, Los Angeles literature, and mythology.

I grew up in a small Texas farm town, and at one point I thought I might be a preacher. Once I decided that wasn't quite the path, I went to grad school instead. My training’s in American literature and environmental theory, and early in my career I became a big-ish fish in a very small pond—I helped establish ecopoetry as a literary field, which mostly meant convincing other academics that a new, environmentally focused brand of nature poetry was worth taking seriously.

When I moved to Los Angeles, my research shifted along with my geography. I started writing about LA literature and culture, particularly how myth, landscape, history, and inequality keep intersecting in this very strange city.

Over the last several years the work has gotten more personal and more interdisciplinary. Alongside academic writing, I've ghostwritten more than a dozen books (two New York Times bestsellers among them), written some fiction, and turned out dozens of country heartbreak songs along the way. My scholarly focus has gradually moved toward myth and narrative, especially as they speak to what Carl Jung called the second half of life.

I'm now finishing a second PhD, this one in mythological studies and depth psychology, at Pacifica Graduate Institute, with a dissertation on myth, music, and midlife. And I'm co-authoring Q3: Mapping the Second Half of Life Through the World's Great Stories with Chip Conley, founder of the Modern Elder Academy, forthcoming from Little, Brown in 2028.

That's the official version. The unofficial one is that I think the world's old stories know more about how to live than we usually let them tell us. I spend most of my time these days trying to make that case in writing, on YouTube, on a podcast, and in classrooms full of nineteen-year-olds.