My Works

My fiction explores people caught between the worlds they inherited and the lives they are trying to build for themselves. Some stories wrestle directly with religion, others with politics, institutions, identity, or power, but they share the same central question: what happens when the systems meant to give us meaning begin demanding more than we are willing to surrender? These are stories about doubt, belonging, rebellion, and the unlikely communities people create when the old ones can no longer hold them. If you see one that is unpublished and would like to represent it as a client, please reach out to me via the agent link at the top of the page. If you would like to be a beta reader, please reach out via my general contact.

At seventeen, Josh Greenburg stands before a room of high school students and compares sexual purity to a rose. By the end of the sermon, the flower has been stripped of its petals, bent, and discarded—a picture, he tells them, of what happens when someone gives away too much of themselves. Then he finds a teenage mother crying in the back of the room, convinced that she is the rose and no one will ever love her.

Six years later, Josh is still trying to answer the question she left him with.

A senior at a Southern Baptist seminary, Josh arrives in Tampa for a coveted summer internship at Venture, a rapidly growing megachurch that seems to offer everything he has spent years searching for: purpose, belonging, a future in ministry, and a charismatic mentor who believes God has something extraordinary planned for him. After years of doubts, theological arguments, and feeling increasingly alienated from the institutions that trained him, Venture feels like proof that perhaps he really was called after all.

Then he is assigned to River’s Edge.

The waterfront community is changing quickly. Old neighborhoods are disappearing beneath expensive redevelopment, and Venture intends to be part of what comes next. Josh is supposed to help bring new residents into the church. Instead, he becomes fascinated by one place he has been explicitly warned to avoid: The Dirty Mermaid, a battered bar at the edge of the river run by a sex worker named El. Venture considers the Mermaid a den of everything Christianity is supposed to oppose. Josh sees a mission field.

What he finds there is far more complicated. The Mermaid is home to dancers, bartenders, addicts, atheists, queer men and women, sex workers, drunks, believers, doubters, and people who stopped worrying long ago about which category they belong in. They swear too much, drink too much, argue constantly, and possess little interest in being rescued. Yet the deeper Josh enters their lives, the harder it becomes to reconcile the people in front of him with everything he has been taught about them.

Caught between two communities that both offer him something he desperately needs, Josh begins confronting questions that theology alone can no longer contain. What does it mean to love someone without trying to change them? When does accountability become control? Can a belief be good if its application consistently wounds people? Is doubt a failure of faith—or the first honest act of it? And what happens when the people you were sent to save begin saving something in you instead?

Set against the collision of megachurch Christianity and a profane waterfront chosen family, The Dirty Mermaid is a tragicomic novel about purity culture, desire, religious deconstruction, institutional power, and the strange communities people build when certainty begins to collapse.

It is not a story about discovering that believers are evil and outsiders are good.

It is about the much harder realization that people can love you deeply and still hurt you, that people you were taught to fear can become family, and that sometimes losing the answers is the only way to begin asking the right questions.

For five years, Daniel Yates has been trying to build a Southern Baptist church in the Bronx.

It was supposed to be a mission.

Sent from North Carolina to plant a congregation in what some members of his home church jokingly call 'Babylon, United States of America,' Daniel arrives with funding, a leased building, monthly spreadsheets to complete, and a calling he desperately wants to believe is real. But five years later, The Way Fellowship remains almost empty, his mentor is hundreds of miles away recovering from cancer, and Daniel is beginning to suspect that the faith he was sent to preach may no longer be the faith he believes.

Then Isaías Castillo dies with fifty-four cents in his bank account.

When Isaías’s grieving mother asks whether she will ever see her son again, Daniel discovers he can no longer preach the answers he was taught. He cannot turn a young man destroyed by addiction into an evangelistic warning. He cannot believe a needle is stronger than grace. So instead of certainty, he offers hope.

Someone in the congregation is listening.

A month later, Luis Rosario arrives at the church in heroin withdrawal and demands the help Daniel promised from the pulpit. Daniel has no program, no training, and almost no idea what he is doing. He simply refuses to let Luis face it alone.

That decision changes everything.

Soon The Way begins filling with people Daniel was never sent to reach: addicts and atheists, queer couples and sex workers, doubters and believers, a police sergeant struggling with the things he has witnessed, a fiercely protective Dominican mother, a Muslim nurse practitioner and her daughter, and others who have learned that religious institutions often become most dangerous when they are absolutely certain they are right.

The more Daniel admits that he does not have the answers, the more people begin showing up.

Sunday services become shared meals. Sermons become arguments, confessions, and questions. People who disagree about God sit at the same table and feed one another anyway. What began as a failing church plant slowly becomes something Daniel never intended to create—and something his sponsoring church in North Carolina may not recognize as Christianity at all.

At the center of it is Daniel himself, a pastor unsure whether Christ rose from the dead, still unable to walk away from the possibility that love might be sacred. His growing relationship with Sehar, a divorced Muslim woman wrestling with her own inherited faith, forces him to confront how much of his theology he genuinely believes and how much he simply fears losing.

Set in the Bronx during the upheaval of the 2016 election, The Wrong Kind of Revival is a novel about religious doubt, addiction, politics, community, and what happens when a church stops asking who belongs and starts asking who is bleeding.

It is not a story about a pastor losing his faith.

It is about a man discovering that certainty may have been the least important part of faith all along—and about a congregation that begins to grow only after its pastor stops trying to save everyone.