WORK

THE SIN BETWEEN US is a book about the killing of a gay man ––a hate-crime before it was legally designated as such––and its wake in a rural Midwest community.  It is a book about transgression and violence; it is about a shared adolescence between the author and killer, and about how place shapes the state-of-mind of hate and how that shaping is normalized.  The book attempts to apprehend how the experience of hate is made intimate in individual lives, and how a community––its institutions, its social, moral, and political geography––also becomes an actor in the story of violence.  Said plainly, THE SIN BETWEEN US is a close look at what is happening in rural America today through the lens of hate––how it is sustained, buried, ignored, and especially, how it is felt––and the possibilities of repair.