2025! What a year, with many leaps of faith (and it wasn’t even a Leap Year). A new job and a new roommate 🤭 Old friends in new places like Toronto, Palm Springs, Stockholm, and Amsterdam. Some familiar backdrops like Chicago, North Carolina, the Pines, and the Crown Inn. There were many horrors in the world this year, but the world keeps spinning, and I’m so lucky to get to spin alongside you all. Thank you so much 🙏 Over and out 🫡
De Amsterdump…the green, the canals, the techno, the windmills, the parks, the bitterballen (not pitcutred but eaten swiftly), and the best locals to show me around. I had a piece of bread and I did indeed calm down. Het is geen vaarwel, het is tot ziens.
👋🌳💐🛶🇳🇱❤️🔥
Hejjjjj from Stockholm, where we Fika’d hard and hardly saw the sun…good thing Christmas comes early there. And obviously with colleagues coming from all around the world, Mr. Brightside at karaoke is the great equalizer. 🦌🎄🍫❄️🪩✌️
Grid post proof of life from the past 5 months featuring the exotic locales of Toronto, Chicago, Palm Springs, North Carolina, Connecticut, and the Port-au-Prince of America—or everywhere I took Miss Boot in 2025.
The epitaph on Paul Monette’s grave reads, “A champion to his people.” @rack__roll is a champion to his people: trans, gay and bi people; book people; Cavalier King Charles people. Since meeting him in the days before July 4, 2021, I’ve watched him nurture singular storytellers with delicious wit, super strength and sidesplitting track changes. (He, in turn, has seen me experiment with facial hair and Propecia.) Zack and the rest of the @abramsbooks team made sure I was included in most decisions about Leg, from the paper to the binding to @devingrosz ’s iconic cover. His fortitude and good cheer lent me fortitude and good cheer and made me feel like I could and should be silly, smutty and daring in my work (and, frankly, in my Speedo-clad book promotion). So this is me, and us, giving Zack Knoll, strapping Survivor superfan, book slut and dear pal a woof for the ages. Here’s to your next adventure. Cheers, champ.
2024 all stacked up!! These are the many books I was lucky enough to publish this year. It’s an immense pleasure and privilege to get to do this job, ushering these beauties into the world. I’m grateful for everyone in my corner of the publishing world who makes this possible—my amazing colleagues across @abramsbooks and the industry, and the agents, booksellers, and readers on the other side. Of course, I couldn’t do any of this without these incredibly talented authors—thank you for trusting me with your stories. And thank you to everyone who read one of these books this year!
Today marks 10 (!) years since I hopped off a plane at LGA (dreams in tow; no cardigan). Sometimes it feels like I’ve lived in NYC for 100 years, and at other times I feel like I’m still brand new — discovering new places, meeting new people, embarking on new adventures like I’m still 22. I had no idea how long I’d last here, if at all, honestly. I spent my early days up in Morningside Heights, and then frantically applied for jobs all summer in the Dunkin Donuts on Nostrand and Eastern Parkway (we had no wifi for days…shoutout to my amazing first roommates @hapagee@jillybuckets@deesh_ who made the landing here so gentle and fun). Things have only gotten slightly more glamorous since then, happily.
It’s hard to summarize or capture all of the people and experiences that have made up my first decade in this city. It has been wildly fun, and formative, and occasionally difficult or disheartening, but I’ve been so lucky to have built a beautiful community here, who have carried me through no matter the circumstances. So many friends and colleagues and strangers met in passing, have since come and gone. But I do genuinely feel grateful for the ways my small life has touched so many others while living together on this island.
It’s even harder to pick just TEN photos to cover ten years. So here’s one from around June 14th from every year that has passed. Swipe to literally watch me age in reverse from 2024 to 2014.
Here’s to you, New York—you gorgeous, glittering, occasionally stinky but always singular, town. Cheers to the past decade, and cheers to the next one.
I’ll always be a Chicagoan at heart but…I think I’m officially a New Yorker now…right?
