*My name is William Furio and I also go by the performance name HORDE. I am a nonfiction essayist/storyteller, poet, and performance artist. From 2002-2021, I was in the throes of acute complex post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative identity disorder. While surviving high school, college, and moving to NYC with nothing; building a beautiful community; producing art; having a successful career in events; and trying to experience as much as I can; that period of time was a harrowing experience that I do not wish on anyone. It’s an incredible feeling to be centered and present, and for the past two years I have been writing a book of nonfiction essays and stories.

The first story is about friendship and providing language to one another when it doesn’t exist or isn’t readily accessible in society (really a love letter to the support that exists in marginalized communities); followed by how I began to tell and told my life story to myself (all that was suppressed by violent trauma); friendship breakups and the pandemic; rape culture, capitalism, self-abandonment, and the workplace; whiteness, racism, and the workplace; sexuality, gay culture, and gender; the insane underground club/after hours club that was ran by a squatter next door to me and my best friend’s apartment building; and a love letter to my father.

Also, I am an Events and Communications Specialist, currently working at the Spain-U.S. Chamber of Commerce with past employment comprising Jazz at Lincoln Center, Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, Apollo Theater, SummerStage, and New York Open Center. For college, I attended the Claremont Consortium and New York University, graduating in Creative Writing, Social Theory, and History with a focus on post-1776 capitalist democratic revolutions in the Americas.

*If you’d like to learn more about me and the book I’m writing, you can listen to an interview I had with comedian and doula Danielle Deluty on her podcast female intern.