I'm Chris. Salutations!

Born in Topeka, Kansas but taught to fear Jesus in the mighty Northern Virginia suburbs, I quit the East Coast after college for an extended stay in the placid surfer’s paradise of Ventura, California, where I wrote for an alt-weekly. After earning a screenwriting degree from UCLA, I worked for a magician for a while, but was eventually seduced back east by Washington, DC's pedestrian-accessible charms.

My writing appears regularly in The Washington City Paper, at NPR,  and in The Washington Post.  I’m an occasional panelist on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. I've written for Slate, The Guardian, PASTE and The Indian Express. I was a proud contributor to the best film criticism site on the web, The Dissolve, until its premature demise in July 2015, and to The Village Voice, until that mighty alt-weekly went down swinging, too. Orson Welles is my hero. Loves: running, comic books, thunderstorms, old time radio drama. Hates: treadmills, reality TV, Auto-Tune.

I was a 2009 NEA Institute Fellow, and a 2012 AltWeekly Awards finalist in the category of Arts Criticism, circulation 50,000 and above. I was a finalist again in 2017.

In 2015, I was selected as a Critic Fellow for the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center's National Critics Institute.

E-mail me at snakeoilck at gmail. Want to buy me a coffee? I wouldn’t say no but I would say thank you.