I publish all of my books under Shovel & Axe Press — a small, independent imprint I founded to honor the tension at the heart of being human. Namely, a shovel plants a tree. An axe cuts one down. We embody both simultaneously.
My books explore what it means to teach, to coach, to love, to lead, and to live in a world where every act of making is also, in some way, an act of unmaking. Each book is an attempt to understand how we become the people we are called to be.
In Progress:
Manly: A Field Report (Coming 2026)
A book that explores the tensions a man must learn to hold, the standards he must choose to live by, and the fragments of wisdom he gathers from experience—scars, mentors, mistakes, and quiet moments when, as a boy, he watches other men and decides, “That is who I will be.”
Published:
Forty essays and ten game-day speeches on brotherhood, masculinity, and the practice of becoming
Through lyrical essays that move from two-a-days to the mythology of competition, from locker room speeches to the brotherhood that lasts decades, FOOTBALL IS… shows coaches, players, and parents the transformational potential hiding in plain sight on every field across America.
A loving manifesto for liberating the wild genius in student and teacher alike
“All readers who believe that our educational assumptions and systems fall far short of what is possible, will find themselves saying “Amen”, again and again, to Rewild School.” – Irene Carney (former Executive Director, Sabot School)
48 pages of uncomfortable truth
Do-Goodernomics is an unsettling examination of what happens when good intentions meet scarcity. Using the tools of economics—and informed by years of experience in development work—it explores the Market for Good: the transactions between those who want to help and those we’ve decided need helping.
Power, Proximity, and the Practice of Humility
Sidekick Manifesto II brings together eighteen practitioners from across the Majority and Minority World—economists and poets, NGO leaders and community development practitioners, insiders and outsiders. Together they return to the original Manifesto’s preambles and promises. Not to polish them, but to interrogate them, and decide: Keep, Reimagine, or Discard.