WRITING

He writes Gathering Ground, a dispatch from the fieldwork for The Country We Make — reports from the road, published as the interviews happen.

Essays have appeared on the civic argument at the center of the book, including We Have Only Been Facing the Wrong Way, on what the country’s 250th anniversary asks of the places that have been overlooked.

SPEAKING

Thirty years of leading cultural institutions has meant thirty years of speaking — to boards, funders, legislators, conferences, and the rooms where a case has to be made out loud before anything gets built.

The subject he speaks on now is newer: rural cultural infrastructure as load-bearing democratic architecture. It is the argument of the book, and he is at the beginning of making it in public rather than in the sector rooms where it was formed.

He speaks on the work that keeps small places whole, on governance and institutional durability, and on building where philanthropic infrastructure is thin.

On July 4, 2026 — the country's two hundred fiftieth Independence Day — he spoke at a First Amendment rally on the grounds of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, sharing a program with a state senator, a retired judge, and a poet. The remarks closed on a phrase he had not yet used in public: the country we make.

Inquiries welcome.