I started writing language arts educational materials as a freelancer in 2003, and for a girl whose greatest delight in middle school was diagramming sentences, the work was a pretty good fit. Since then, I’ve developed countless passages and items for K-12 as well as SAT and GRE prep materials. I’ve also taught writing and literature at the middle school, high school, and college levels.

I’m a fiction writer at work on a novel about land rights, oil, and erosion in my home state of Louisiana. I hold an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I was a Truman Capote Fellow in the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford University, where I have also been a lecturer since 2009. My work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Ecotone, Tin House, New Stories from the South, and other journals and anthologies, and has been supported most recently by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

I live in Portland, Maine, with my husband Jonah, my three-year-old daughter Adelaide, and my sweet and cranky duck-tolling retriever mix Zelda.