I'm delighted that my debut novel, RIVER OF DUST, is an Indie Next Pick for May, 2013. My award-winning short stories have been published in numerous literary magazines, including "The North American Review," "Failbetter," "The Baltimore Review" and "Tampa Review." I hold an MFA from Sarah Lawrence where I studied with Joan Silber and Allan Gurganus. At Wesleyan, Annie Dillard was my first mentor. I have taught writing at New York University, The University of Pennsylvania, and was chair of James River Writers, a literary non-profit in Richmond, Virginia. I have been awarded fellowships to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Acadia Summer Arts Program, and have attended the Tin House’s Writer’s Conference.
I have an essay on the origins of my novel forthcoming in "The Rumpus." I will soon be interviewed in "The Nervous Breakdown" and "The Huffington Post," and excerpts from RIVER OF DUST will appear in "TNB," "The Collagist," and "DearReader.com."
I’ve been writing since I was ten and love it now more than ever. I started out writing poetry, then short stories. I wrote my first novel in graduate school at Sarah Lawrence and wrote another one just before my children were born. I picked up again after several years when my second child started kindergarten. At the moment, I’m working on two different novels and a collection of short stories. Philip Roth said in his retirement-from-writing speech on the occasion of his eightieth birthday that the job of the American novelist is “to discover the most arresting, evocative verbal depiction of every last American thing.” I, and every writer I know, have our jobs cut out for us. Luckily, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.
Wow, the list is long. In no particular order: Marilynne Robinson,Micheal Ondaatje, Alice Munroe, Penelope Lively, William Trevor, Tobias Wolfe,Robert Olen Butler, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jayne Anne Phillips, Per Petterson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, I'm riffing here, and newer writers, of course, Julia Glass, kevin Powers, Thom Jones, Ha Jin, Kingsolver, Peter Geye, Tim O'Brien, Elizabeth Strout, Sigrid Nunez, Paul Harding, Josh Weil, Joan Silber, Carol Shields, Tony Early, Alan Gurganus, Grace Paley, Eleanor Henderson, Edward St. Aubyn, Lauren Groff, Stewart O'Nan, Edith Wharton, and on and on...
