About The Usonian

I’m a writer, journalist, and screenwriter—and The Usonian is my newsletter. “Usonia” was a word coined in 1903 by a writer named James Duff Law as an alternative name for the United States of America. The Usonian considers the intersections of architecture, urbanism, travel, and literature (particularly that of the Mediterranean) to help strive for a better world.

Newsletters come out on a bimonthly basis on Thursdays at noon ET. If you subscribe, each new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox. Paid subscribers get an exclusive post in the Usonian+ travel series on a monthly basis.

More about me: I earned an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno and graduated from Princeton University. I’m the Editor of Innovations for Successful Societies at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs; I’ve previously been a reporter in Northern New Mexico and a Fulbright scholar in Cyprus. My work has also been supported by grants from the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Truman Library Institute. My writing has appeared in outlets like The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, The Santa Fe New Mexican, and Ploughshares; I also consult on film and TV projects.

My professional website can be found at harrisonblackman.com. My Medium blog can be found here. I can also be found on “Twitter” at @HWBMan.

Be sure to check out The Cyprus Files, a limited newsletter series that exists as a subset of The Usonian’s main mission—dispatches from my Fulbright year and beyond on the island of Aphrodite.

In 2023, I launched a new series, The World Planner, about the life and times of global architect and planner Constantinos Doxiadis (1913-1975).

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