About Me

My story is short

It begins with a script for a puppet show in fourth grade that landed me in the principal’s office. I was branded an independent thinker, and soon filled my high school journals with teen angst and quirky poems. After graduating from Ohio University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, I dreamed of being a rock critic for Rolling Stone but instead landed at an educational publishing company. Since then, I have written corporate communications and ad copy for everything from Prada to Preparation H, but fiction writing is my first love.

In 1999, I submitted my first short story to literary journals. War Stories was published that same year in the Beloit Fiction Journal.

Since then, I:

• signed on with Maria Vicente at P.S. Literary Agency.
• was a 2024-25 BookEnds Fellow in Stonybrook University Southampton. BookEnds is a yearlong, low-residency novel revision program co-directed by Meg Wolitzer and Alison Fairbrother.
• was selected by Roxanne Gay for The Masters Review’s Best Emerging Writers anthology for “This is an Exercise in Detachment” (featured here on LitHub)
• won the 2017 Bosque Fiction Prize.
• earned an MFA in Creative Writing through Kent State University’s NEOMFA program
• have been published in Passages North, Third Coast, Timber Creek Review, The Writer Magazine, Storyglossia, and other literary journals.
• workshopped with Alice McDermott, Anthony Doerr, Aimee Bender, Stewart O’Nan, Laura Lippman and others.
• won writing grants and awards from the Kentucky Arts Council and Cincinnati’s Mercantile Library.

Now, I’m:

• working on a novel and short story collection
• still writing for a corporation
• attempting to stay out of the principal’s office

Little Known Facts About Me:

• I dream about sharks in primary colors. It’s a recurring dream since childhood.
• I always wanted freckles.
• I think pipe cleaners are underrated as an art form.
• Someday, I will own a pair of shoes to match every outfit in my closet. It will be a very good day.