Henrick Karoliszyn

The Translator

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

The Translator

I translated English to Polish for most of my life, but I started translating memories to the ring when the dementia got worse.

At first it was little things. My father would forget what day it was or put salt in his coffee. Once he called me by the name of a cousin who had died of colon cancer a few months before. I watched the realization crawl over his face when he saw my body didn’t match. But the night he forgot the name of his favorite boxer, I understood that something inside him had slipped beyond my reach.

We were on the lumpy sofa in Avondale, under the print of Pope John Paul II that had faded to a pale, sympathetic blue. The TV shook light across my father’s hallowed cheeks. His hair, once coal-black, now lay in downy tufts that made him look perpetually startled.

“Córeczko,” he said, frowning at the old HBO replay. “You know, the… the eagle, the… jak on miał…?”

The rest of the sentence drifted toward the window, slipped through the gap in the warped frame, and floated away over Milwaukee Avenue, up toward Glenview, where rumor said the rich people lived with their perfect brains.

“Biały Orzeł,” I said gently. “The White Eagle.”

I said it in Polish first, then in the kind of English we used when we wanted to feel American, speaking from the side of the mouth. He repeated the name — Biały Orzeł — and grinned, the room of his missing front tooth revealing a new vacancy. For a moment, I could almost see the recognition glide back from the roofs and re-enter his skull, settling where it belonged.

My father was Staszek when he was amused and Pan Stanisław when he wanted respect. To kids at P.S. 190, he was Mr. Nowak, the janitor with the unconventional voice who fixed gummy lockers and sang old church songs, mostly “Bogurodzica,” a hymn from his altar boy days. To me, he was ojciec, the man who taught me to count with rosary beads and once told me that if you stood under the El long enough, the city would reveal a secret.

He came to America from Łódź with a valise and a rumor of a job from a cousin who hammered door hinges in a factory. He stayed in Chicago because sometimes rumors are true. He was always a man with pages to read before sleep, news to keep up on, and secrets of his own to listen out for. Before long, those pages dispersed, the news stopped reaching him, and the secrets went to other people.

The first physical thing he lost was his grocery list.

It was around Christmas. Aunt Izabella came over from Belmont Cragin with her stepson Ignacy, and the apartment filled with the snow melt of their coats. It was always the same list — beets, carrots, potatoes, onions for borscht, potato vodka, boxed pierogi, two bottles of red wine, pig knuckles, kielbasa, coffee, and makowiec. When he lost the list at the store, he found himself stranded in front of the shelves of oil —olive, canola, vegetable — unable to remember if he had meant to buy any of them or none at all.

He told me later, embarrassed, how the aisle had seemed too bright, the English too fast, the floor too glossy. “Jak sen,” he said. Like a dream. Or, I thought, a dream letting go of him.

A week after that, he began asking for boks.

“Boks, Zosiu?” he said, eyes suddenly boyish. “Proszę. Please, boks?”

His gaze would tug toward the TV whenever old fights flashed by. “Chcę usłyszeć ludzi,” he said. I want to hear people. He wanted bells and leather against chins, the low-crooning of strangers agreeing for one night what to have faith in. Boxing had become his new religion. The ring was the altar, ropes like the rail, the cutman’s towel a kind of blessing.

One Saturday, I took him to the Copernicus Center.

*

The hall smelled of pickles and Zywiec Lager, of old rugs and dusty gloves. The ring looked tinier up close, the canvas a little scratched, the corners bandaged with black duct tape and tied together with rope. Basia, the promoter, strode around in a red leather jacket, her dyed hair in fried-onion curls bouncing as if to the rhythm of dirty jokes she would tell.

The crowd was a stew of locals. Grandpas in white socks pulled to the calf and suspenders stretched over their lager bellies. Kids in oversized hoodies recording everything on their phones. Aunties in foam clogs, their hair pinned up with plastic clips. A slim priest from somewhere near Kraków whose collar shined white.

I tugged my denim jacket closed though the hall was warm. The years had taught me that the heat between my thighs and the way my stomach pressed against fabric were things other people felt license to comment on. In our community I was Petra the Pierogi Girl, as if my body had been assembled in a deli case and filled with potato and disgrace. I had learned to carry that shame without letting it carry me under, but it still rose sometimes, like the ocean spray against the rocks of my belly.

We found seats three rows back from the apron, behind a guy in a red hat that shouted POLSKA in white. My father held my hand, the map of his knuckles telling the story of his work. Electrician, cable installer, warehouse custodian. He’d wanted to be a ring announcer once, he told me in the kitchen when I was young, but in Łódź they said his voice was too coarse. Now it often came out in handfuls of soft coughs.

The house mic sputtered. A bilingual ring announcer with a whipped-cream pompadour called the matches in English and Polish. The first bout was a flurry of nerves. Two young men, both underfed and overly tattooed, danced around one another, selling menace the way the deli man sold kabanosy. Equal parts salty and addictive, going perfectly with a beer. You could hear gloves slap skin. The corner men barked shrill syllables. The crowd became one body with a hundred mouths and two hundred eyes.

At the commentary table, two thick-necked men in cheap blazers poked at their headsets and traded clichés for their local Fightcast stream.

“Co oni mówią?” my father asked, nodding toward them. What are they saying?

I leaned closer, my mouth near his ear. “They’re telling the little stories,” I said in Polish. “One is orthodox, one southpaw. One trains at Dogtown Gym, one at Bill’s Boxing Club. The favorite posted a picture of his grandma’s Christmas pierogi, so everyone wants him to win.”

I began to translate the broadcast from then on. English into Polish, then back into the Chicago Polish we shared, that half-frozen dialect that thawed with its usage. When he asked a question in old-fashioned words from his youth, I re-translated them into the slang we both knew, bridging his fading world and the one we inhabited together.

At first, I didn’t notice people turning. I was too busy keeping pace with the fight in my lips. “Teraz prawy prosty,” I murmured — now the straight right — and he clapped and shouted “Brawo!” with a fan’s cruelty as one boxer smacked the other down to the canvas.

By the second fight, I felt the eyes.

A girl with pink hair and a lip ring slid into the aisle beside us, phone in hand, chin in her palms as if she’d stumbled into an angsty goth movie. An older man with a mustache as glorious as any czar’s, kept glancing back, eavesdropping. A kid behind us whispered, “Who is she?” and his friend whispered, “The fight translator,” like it was a Marvel origin story.

In the third bout, a swaggering middleweight called Trashman who entered the ring in a city sanitation jacket landed two rabbit punches in a clinch. The ref half-saw, half-didn’t. The room soured.

“Nielegalne,” I said under my breath. “Uderzenie w tył głowy.” Illegal. A shot to the back of the head.

“Oszust!” my father yelled. Cheater.

The pink-haired girl echoed him before laughing into her sleeve. I kept talking, explaining not just the punches but the intentions. Trashman didn’t just fight dirty. He made ugliness a tactic. He wanted the bout to look like garbage as if that would elevate the sport.

I was not performing then — not exactly. I was stitching the story back into my father’s head, making a world he could still inhabit even as the real one became oily. But my voice sprouted to spread into the room’s ears.

After the last fight, as people shuffled up the aisles, the girl with pink hair came toward us, moving like someone approaching a shy animal.

“Um, hi,” she said, in careful Polish that fitted a teenager who had learned it at her babcia’s table and nowhere else. “Cześć. I’m sorry—przepraszam. I recorded some of you. You were kind of amazing. You make it sound… ważne. Important.”

I felt a heat flare in my face. “Nie trzeba,” I said. No need.

“Ale dziękuję.” But thank you.

“Your tata,” she added, looking at him. “Widać, że kocha.” You can see he loves it.

My father, not quite following, smiled at her anyway. He had always trusted people who looked like they could still be saved.

*

Two days later, the landline rang. The landline almost never rang.

“Kid,” Basia said when I picked up, her voice like the underside of a pot — burnt to black, trusted, ready. “We got calls. People asking about the girl giving the Polish play-by-play. You want to sit at the commentary table next card and do it for real? Bring your father. I can’t pay much. We’re a baby outfit. But I can give you a hot dog that doesn’t taste like junk and ice cold beer.”

I looked at my father, dozing in his chair. The TV flickered indigo over his face, over the framed print of the Pope, over the scarf folded on the armrest — BIAŁY ORZEŁ in thick red letters, the fabric worn shiny where his thumb had smoothed it during a hundred fights that weren’t his.

“Tak,” I said. “Yes. I’ll come.”

On the night of my debut, I braided my hair into two loose ropes my father said made me look like a loaf of bread. He wore his cleanest flannel and the ancient White Eagle scarf, smoothing it like it might take flight if he took his hand away.

They sat me at the end of the table near the timekeeper. The veteran English commentator — a man named Harris who had been calling fights since the Bulls mattered — peered over his glasses.

“Keep your mic off when I’m talking,” he said. “Don’t step on big moments. If you don’t know what a punch is called, don’t fake it. The audience eats fake and craps it out.”

“Spoko,” I said. Got it.

He started the broadcast in English, voice booming, words rolling out like he’d practiced them alone in a dark room for years.

“We’re here under the lights on a cold Chicago night,” he said. “We’re here to watch courage measured in ounces and stitched into gloves.”

He flicked his eyes at me and pointed at my mic: on.

I took a breath. “Dobry wieczór, rodzino,” I said. Good evening, family. My Polish went into English, before the secret third language again —the hybrid Chicago tongue that lived in a neighborhood between them. “We’re here pod światłami, under lights, where two people test the distance between each other, and we clap because we recognize a magic trick when we see it.”

I did not translate Harris word for word. I translated intentions. When one fighter refused to touch gloves? “He’s telling us he won’t promise respect, which means he’ll try to break something later.” When a clean one-two landed and you could hear the pop all the way to Belmont, I added my minor editorial. “Jab to pytanie. A right hand — odpowiedź.” The jab is a question while the right hand an answer.

My father’s hand rested on my forearm, warm and steady. He didn’t ask questions. The fight now came into his head in a language that fit the shape of his fading recall, and I could feel his mind lean toward my voice like a plant toward a window’s sunlight.

The first audible ripple in the crowd wasn’t for a knockdown. It was for something that slipped out of my mouth whole, the way sometimes a song you’d forgotten you knew comes back.

In the second bout, a fighter took a brutal body shot and staggered, hands low, as if his heart had been tampered with.

“Nie możesz znokautować czyjegoś serca,” I said quietly.

You can try but you cannot knock out a person’s heart.

I heard someone in the front row repeat it. My father squeezed my arm.

By the final fight, a small chant had begun in the seats closest to us. It wasn’t quite my name, but close enough. “Pe-tra, Pe-tra,” they tried, then let it dissolve into something vowel-heavy and Polish, something that meant girl, daughter, our own.

I tugged at my jacket, aware again of the way my stomach surged against the table’s edge, the old mark of visibility. My father rose, wobbly, leaning on the back of my chair. He bent and kissed the top of my head, headset askew.

“Moja cudowna,” he said. My wonderful one.

Something lax and electric moved through the room, like a current chasing itself around a closed circuit. Harris’s voice faltered for a beat. Even the ring seemed to pause.

Later, in the dark of our apartment, I lay awake replaying that moment. The words, the kiss, the way the crowd’s inhalation had seemed to hitch. It felt like a bell at the end of a round. Not an end, exactly, but an assurance of what’s to come.

*

Small fame, if you can call it that, doesn’t come like an elevator with illumined buttons. It comes like a staircase with bad lighting. You can still climb, but you watch your feet and try not to fall.

Basia started putting my name on the posters: PETRA NOWAK – POLISH COMMENTARY. A small local network came one night to film a segment about “the daughter giving her father his fights back.” One of the technicians cried behind his camera. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, embarrassed, when I glanced at him.

A woman from a Polish cable channel called PolVision showed up at a card and watched me work from the back row, arms folded.

Afterward, she found us by the soda machine. “We broadcast big promotions with only English commentary,” she said. Her accent was the kind forged in factory break rooms, flattened but still transporting vowels of a village. “My viewers complain. They want someone to tell them the story in the language they dream in. Would you come to our studio? Try a show?”

“Może,” I said. Maybe.

“Tylko jedna rzecz,” she added. Just one thing. “Bring your father. On or off camera, as you like. He is part of this.”

*

At PolVision, everything beamed, scrubbed within an inch of its life. They sat me in front of a green screen that later would become fireworks behind a Polish flag. Two male commentators in crisp shirts nodded at me politely, like I was a cousin brought into a family business as a favor.

The producer, a woman with a binder full of storylines and a silver necklace winding around her wrist like ivy, took me aside. “You are our most important bridge,” she said. “Between languages. Between generations. But remember — no politics.”

I thought of my father’s theory that avoidance is its own politics. I nodded anyway.

We started with delayed broadcasts of international bouts. English boomed in our earpieces. I weaved it into Polish and back again, into something people like my father could follow. I translated more than punches. I translated fear, bravado, hunger, the slight consolations in a fighter’s corner when they were trailing but had not yet lost.

Vedettes and promoters, men with watches worth more than our whole building, never learned how to say my name right. Petra, Pe-tra, Petty. I stopped correcting them. My father, sitting off to the side in his folding chair, knitting his fingers around the White Eagle scarf, never mispronounced Polish names.

On Thursdays — the PolVision day — I left him at home only once.

I set out a thermos of tea, his pills in a little dish. I stacked his favorite poems by Tadeusz Różewicz on the coffee table and queued up old fights on YouTube, the legends he still remembered blow by blow. I kissed his forehead. “Wracam za kilka godzin,” I said. I’ll be back in a few hours.

When I came home, the TV was talking to itself, and the door was ajar.

The hallway stretched. My father’s shoes were gone.

Panic moves through the body differently than any other feeling. It has a keyed-up temperature and a comprehensive rat-tat-tat sound. I ran to the deli where he bought scratch-offs. No luck. I called the police. “He’s an adult,” they said. So, it would take 24 hours to even start a search. I should wait. I called my cousin Kasia. She and her boyfriend fanned out in a car while I walked, lungs burning, scanning every bus stop and storefront window.

They found him an hour later near the river, hatless in the cold, talking earnestly to a lamppost and calling it Basia — my mother’s name, dead ten years, and the promoter’s name, alive. Names mixed in his head of any woman he had ever been in contact with.

He told Kasia he’d seen a fight poster on the side of a bus and meant to follow it. By the time the bus curved, he had forgotten whether he was supposed to get on, or where we lived, or why his hands were suddenly empty.

After that, I brought him everywhere I went.

PolVision found space for him in the studio. Basia put a spare chair near the ring for him at the Copernicus Center, then at other venues when the cards developed bigger audiences. The fighters got used to seeing the old man in the White Eagle scarf nodding along when he wasn’t throwing punches from his seat. They started saluting him with little glove taps from the apron.

Sometimes he fell asleep. Sometimes he watched every second and afterward could repeat back to me the color of the ropes, the way a left hook had sounded against a jawline. His mind was a body of water – one month receding, the next licking a little farther up the shore.

The bigger promotions noticed because they notice everything the way banks notice people wanting credit.

A man with a silky phone voice called. His business card said “Regional Director” for a company that put their logo on every canvas they could.

“We’ve seen your work, Ms. Nowak,” he said. “We’re doing a show in Milwaukee. Live broadcast, bilingual desk. There’s a beautiful story here. Father, daughter, memory. The human-interest angle is.” I could hear him smiling. “Through the roof.”

“Can I bring my father?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. “He’s part of it, isn’t he? That’s the story.”

*

The Milwaukee arena pulsed like a strobe. Light rigs hung over the ring, screens burned in corners. From our desk near the aisle, I could see every face in the first row, the little tremors in their mouths when punches landed.

My father sat just off camera under a blanket, the White Eagle scarf looped once around his lean neck. I tucked a thermos of kasza manna under his chair for later, food he’d eat even when other textures confused him.

The other commentators greeted me with the wary respect reserved for new coworkers who might or might not make you obsolete. The producer’s voice in my headset buzzed.

“Remember the lines they love,” she said. “The heart, the prayer, the questions. People want poetry with their pain.”

The first fight flowed. I translated in the old way. English to Polish, Polish to the hybrid. I reminded viewers that a shot could be a problem, that the resolution did not always land effectively. The distance between two fighters sometimes told you how much they feared themselves more than each other.

Between rounds I turned to check on my father. He dozed, his hands relaxed. During the third bout, I fed him a spoonful of semolina pudding. He opened his mouth on reflex, then smiled with a child’s shy pleasure.

“Moja cudowna,” he said.

“I am your student,” I replied. It felt true.

The main event was a women’s fight. The champion was a heel, a woman the crowd loved to hate. She played the villain well, tearing a sign from a boy’s hands and ripping it in half as she walked to the ring, letting the jeers soak in. The challenger was a southpaw whose shoulders looked shaped from something denser than flesh.

By the ninth round, the arena’s noise had become a creature’s. The heel landed a hit after the bell, quick and dirty. The ref missed it. The replay didn’t.

“Nie tak,” I said softly. Not like this.

My father stood.

He rose suddenly, the blanket spilling from his lap.

“Zosiu,” he called, voice breaking into several octaves. He staggered toward the barricade. A security guard reached him, hand light on his elbow. My father shook his head in alarm and pointed at the ring.

“Powiedz im,” he said. Tell them.

In my ear, the producer’s voice sharpened. “Camera three, do not follow that old man. Camera two, stay wide. Petra, stay on the fight.”

I could have done it. I could have kept calling combinations and commentary while my father was led back like a child. But the first language I ever translated was his. The first job I ever had was to make sense of a world too large for his English and now too fragile for his memory.

I slipped off my headset.

My mic crackled over the wires as it left my hair. The whole arena blurred for a second, sound rushing in without my producer’s voice to filter it. I walked the three steps to my father and put my hands on either side of his face.

“Tato,” I said. “Jestem.” I’m here. “The story is not finished yet. Słuchaj mojego głosu.” Listen to my voice.

His eyes were cloudy. He gripped the railing as if it were the only solid thing. Somewhere in the corner of my vision, I saw the ref finally take a point from the heel after the replay. Justice, late but not absent.

I guided my father back to his chair, tucked the blanket around his legs, pressed the scarf into his lap. I sat back down, settled the headset over my braids, and let my breath find its own tempo.

“Sometimes,” I continued, “the fight you’re watching climbs out of the ring and walks straight into the place where you keep your tenderness. Sometimes the people we love forget where they are, and we remind them with our voices. Tonight, the ring is still a prayer you say with your fists — but the prayer is teaching us, not punishing us.”

In Polish, it sounded like a hymn. In English, like a pledge. Somewhere up in the bleachers, someone started clapping off-beat, and then the whole place, for one brief, strange moment, felt like a cathedral when the organ stops and all you hear is heart.

The challenger won on points. When her hand was lifted, she wept, and the cutman wept, and people at home who had never met her wiped at their eyes and told themselves they weren’t crying. They were just tired. They were just thinking of someone they loved.

*

After Milwaukee, the phone calls changed.

PolVision offered a regular contract. The regional promotion offered something like a salary. A bigger network sent an email with phrases like “bilingual asset” and “expanding demographic” strung between the lines of corporate-speak.

I negotiated only one thing hard: visits.

My father moved into a facility where the nurses spoke gently and knew how to pronounce Polish names. I asked for enough time off and flex in my schedule to be with him daily.

Some days, he knew me. Some days, I was Zuzia or Mama or simply “dziewczynka,” the girl. On the best days, I was Petra and moja cudowna in the same lungful, my name and his love woven taut.

Before big shows, I sat on the edge of his bed and told him the whole card. Who had pulled out with a cut. Who had taken a fight on two weeks’ notice. Who carried their grandmother’s rosary into the ring in their gym bag. I watched his hands twitch with phantom punches, his lips shaping invisible counters.

On the night of the biggest event of my life, the arena looked like a city made entirely of screens. They put me in a suit jacket that didn’t pinch at the waist and a lipstick the color of ripe cherries. My new co-commentator was a former fighter who had boxed in Poland and Japan and walked with a slight limp that she refused to talk about. Under the table, she squeezed my hand once, hard.

The producer’s voice in my ear was steady. “We’re here because people like the sound of your heart when you talk,” she said. “Do the thing that makes your father remember his name.”

They did not let me bring him ringside this time. Insurance and liability, they said. I didn’t argue. Instead, I went to his room in the afternoon, his scarf folded in my bag.

He slept with his mouth slightly open, a soft snore, breath whistling in and out of him. I kissed his forehead, told him who was fighting, and left the TV on the channel that would transmit my voice back to him later.

At the desk, I placed the White Eagle scarf beside my notes. The cameras moved like apex predators around the ring. Somewhere between the walkouts and the first bell, the director cut to a wide shot that caught the point of the desk, the rough red letters of BIAŁY ORZEŁ glaring faintly in HD.

I did not plan my line. Lines that had their own rehearsal and still shied away.

In the seventh round, the champion — this one a quiet, ruthless technician — landed a goodlooking, cruel body shot. The challenger folded, eyes wide, then straightened. The noise in the arena rose and fell.

“Nie możesz znokautować czyjegoś serca,” I said again, almost to myself. You can’t knock out a person’s heart. After a breath, I kept on. “Ale możesz sprawić, że skoczy.” But you can make it jump. “And between rounds, if someone is too tired, you can carry it for them.”

The former fighter beside me made a little noise in her throat. Down on the floor, I saw a girl in the front row nudge her grandmother and point at the screen.

In the nursing home, the night nurse told me later, my father stirred.

He had been sleeping in his recliner, the TV murmuring. The camera landed, briefly, on the scarf. He blinked and leaned forward, the fog retreating.

“Moje,” he said, pointing. Mine. Then, after a beat that must have felt like a whole history had turned over in it, “Jej.” Hers.

He squinted at the screen, at the woman in the suit with the headset and the braids.

“Petra,” he said. All the way through, no slips, no mistaken identity. As if trying the words on again for size. He repeated, “moja cudowna.”

The nurse wrote it down on a scrap of paper so she could recite it to me when I arrived, like a scorecard she hoped I would consider a technical victory.

*

I hung the scarf in our apartment window, the one that faced the El, where my father once told me the city would reveal a secret if you waited long enough. The sun found it every morning, lighting the eagle from behind until it looked like something about to lift off.

My inbox filled with invitations and praise sprinkled with the occasional bladed comment meant to slice through any soft place it found. I saved the invitations and deleted the blades. I took part of my checks and started a fund to pay interpreters at live events — boxing, yes, but also wrestling, dance, town halls — languages that stretched from Tagalog to Somali to ASL.

We called it Bridgers, because sometimes naming a thing is the first step in building it. At the first show we helped, two kids in hijabs held hands in the front row while a woman signed the ring walks so fast her fingers blurred. Afterward, one of the kids asked me to sign their program.

“You made this,” she said.

“Nie,” I answered automatically. No. “We did. The we is very big.”

There are still days when the world tries to reduce me to a single visible fact. My weight, my accent, my usefulness as a symbol. On those days, I wear the denim jacket on purpose, or I wear the suit that reminds me I can own the direction people look. I walk to my father’s room with a box of pączki and a list of who won last week, who lost, who made the crowd gasp.

We sit by his window, and I tell him a fight.

Sometimes he forgets me for an hour. The smog lowers. He calls me pani or asks politely when his daughter will arrive. My heart stumbles. Then I pick it up, as I have asked others to do, and bring it back to where it belongs.

On one of those nights, I sat on his bed with the White Eagle scarf in my lap and told him a story.

I told him about a girl who loved to translate punches into prayers. I told him about a man who loved stories so much that even when some fell out of his pockets, he brewed tea for the ones that stayed. I told him that once, in front of too many lights and too many eyes, he had called her moja cudowna, and the whole world had heard the music in it.

I watched his face as I spoke. He blinked, as if someone had turned up brights in a distant room.

He reached up and touched my cheek with the back of his hand, the way he used to test if a crockpot was too hot.

“Petra,” he said quietly. “Moja cudowna.”

“Opowiedz mi walkę,” he told me. Tell me a fight.

I told him about a glove touch refused at center ring and what it meant about pride. I told him about the favorite who wiped his shoes before stepping between the ropes, because respectful fighters always do. I told him about a first clinch that looked like two old friends hugging, about a crowd leaning forward from their stomachs, pulled by something they couldn’t designate.

I told him that when the moment came — when a body recognized, the way Lake Michigan recognizes November — that it was time to be brave, a daughter stepped forward and opened her mouth. That she translated not just language but fear and devotion and the long miracle of still being remembered.

And when I got to that part, my father laughed softly, the sound jagged and beloved.

“Dobrze,” he said. Good.

Outside, the El roared past, rattling the glass. Inside, in the small room that smelled of disinfectant and apple soap, my father and I sat between rounds, carrying each other’s hearts as carefully as we knew how, waiting together for a bell we would not hear but would recognize all the same.

❧❧❧

Henrick Karoliszyn is a writer based in New Orleans. His fiction was

selected by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and published in the

2025 Hemingway Shorts literary anthology, shortlisted for The Letter Review

Prize, winner of the 2025 Breakwater Review fiction contest, and a finalist

for the 2026 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize (*results are pending)*.

His stories have also been featured in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Flash

Fiction Magazine, ExPat Press and Blood+Honey along with forthcoming

editions of BULL and Modern Flash Fiction literary magazines. He's at work

on a book of short stories, "God is an Atheist on Karaoke Night," and a

novel, "Mojo City."