An Acre of Darkness Book

Photo by Lynsey Englebrecht on Unsplash

Stargazing with my astronomer father helped me weather the alienation I felt growing up in Charlottesville, Virginia. My father died when I was 24, and the blow was devastating. It took years before I could look at the stars without being sad. However, during the pandemic, I returned to stargazing only to realize that we are on the brink of losing the night sky to haze, smoke, and light pollution.

A hybrid memoir, An Acre of Darkness intertwines the story of my own changing relationship with the night sky with stories of scientists, navigators, and astrologers across the centuries who have looked to the night sky to find a place where they belong.

The book seeks to understand the outsized legacy of a Confederate oceanographer, the work of an early woman astronomer whose discoveries went unnoticed for thirty years, and Johannes Kepler, who in the sixteenth century made his major discoveries about planetary movement in the service of astrology.

Finally I consider a sci-fi future in which billionaires seek to leave the Earth altogether. An Acre of Darkness is a lyrical look at the personal, historical, and cultural impact of losing the night sky, and a plea to notice before it’s too late.

I was born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia. I am the author of Stuff Every Beer Snob Should Know (Quirk Books 2018). My writing has been published in journals such as Shenandoah, Terrain, Witness, The Common, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. My work has also appeared in the anthologies Spectral Lines, Not Quite What I Was Planning, Letters to the World, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, and Queer South, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.