I write about time, memory, and nature, and I make songs using sacred texts and found lyrics. I’m interested in the contact zones of knowledge and wisdom, the beauty of limits, and the relational nature of the world. I’m on the lookout to make my work matter in rooms, among trees, and in conversation. A friend convinced me that rainbows shine whether or not we’re there to see them. ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς·
I’ve written for The American Scholar, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Times. My sixth and most recent book, TREE, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2017, explores the ways of trees in their lives and ours; my first book, Library: An Unquiet History (W. W. Norton 2003), still in print, traces the idea of the library moving through history from antiquity to the present. With a far-flung network of collaborators, I’ve had the chance to make films, installations, and heightened experiences from Boston to Berlin. For Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, I edit Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, a magazine exploring the urgency of tree-entangled science, history and storytelling for our time, and I am a lecturer in comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.