Artist’s Statement 

 

​My work—fiction and nonfiction—is united by a single preoccupation: the nature of human freedom. Where does it come from? Who defines it? And how has it been shaped, restricted, or mythologized by the forces of religion, empire, capital, and memory?

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I’m drawn to stories that excavate the machinery beneath what we call truth. In I, Jesus, two scholars uncover a buried gospel written in Jesus’s own hand—a voice that challenges two thousand years of doctrinal control. In Ailia's Choice, the very institutions that designed a sentient AI to preserve human freedom end up outlawing it. Libertyland imagines an America dismantled by libertarian billionaires who sell freedom as a product, even as they erase it in practice.  And The Human Element explores the moral cost of literary success through a novel-within-a-novel—where authorship becomes a form of control, and narrative itself becomes a battleground over meaning.

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My nonfiction—including Tearing Down the Gates and Standardized Minds—traces how institutions preserve inequality while claiming to promote merit or truth. Across genres, I return to the same questions: Who decides what freedom means? Who gets to feel it? And how does power survive by controlling its definition?

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For me, fiction isn’t an escape from these questions—it’s a deeper confrontation. I write to surface the contradictions buried in language, policy, belief, and culture. Not to answer them neatly, but to widen the space in which they can be asked.

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Freedom isn’t fixed. It’s a site of struggle. I write to keep that struggle visible—and to reclaim its moral and imaginative force.