Who am I?

I'm a writer in Tucson, Arizona.

If you want to get in touch, email is best: j@joelhans.com.

You can follow along on Mastodon (@joelhans@mastodon.social). I have Twitter (@joelhans) too, but it's mostly updates-only at this point.

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For fun, I write fiction and other oddities in prose.

Some of those works have been featured in West Branch, No Tokens, Puerto del Sol, Booth: A Journal, The Adroit Journal, The Masters Review, Caketrain, and others. I maintain a list of all these publications if you'd like to take a look.

I received my MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona in 2016 and served as the prose & managing editor of Fairy Tale Review from 2014 to 2018.

I'm currently working on a novel about mythology, fatherhood, constellations, light pollution, and the lengths to which we might go to rewrite our own stories.

My work was listed as an honorable mention in the Caketrain Competition and the Madeline P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize judged by Brian Evenson, nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and the recipient of the University of Arizona Foundation Award.

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I'm also a copywriter and strategic consultant for tech companies through my business, Commit Copy. Hop over there to learn more about my philosophy, capabilities, and details on starting an engagement.

I started copywriting back in 2016 after receiving my MFA from the University of Arizona, pulling together some fantastic clients like IBM, Red Hat, and Autodesk to focus on high-value assets, like technical white papers and email campaigns.

In 2019, I was recruited to lead technical marketing, documentation, and developer education at Netdata, a startup building more democratic infrastructure monitoring software. I stayed there for two years before returning to consulting to fine-tune my work-life and strategy-implementation balances.

Since returning to copywriting and consulting under Commit Copy, I've expanded into open-source clients like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Kubeshop (Monokle, Testkube), along with various Web3 projects like Urbit and Radicle.

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Writing isn't my only interest.

I spend as much time as I can with my daughters, mountain bike, play guitar, do calisthenics, and walk around my backyard barefoot. There's also running, web development, knowledge graphs, gardening, and a few other interests—hopefully write about each of them someday.