ABOUT

I’m an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Union College in Schenectady, New York. My stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Better: Culture and Lit, and elsewhere. My essay  “Marceline Wanted a Bigger Adventure” won a 2020 Pushcart Prize. My stories have been twice named as notable in the Best American Short Stories anthologies (2008, 2010), and once in the Best American Nonrequired Reading series (2007), and an essay was listed as notable in the Best American Essays 2020. I hold an MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and  a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah.

My debut novel, The Good Echo, was published by Black Lawrence Press in December 2018. Set in the 1930s, and spanning the globe, The Good Echo is the story of a marriage between controversial nutritionist and dentist Clifford Bell, and his quietly courageous wife Frances. After their young son dies from surgery Clifford performs, the two seek to escape their grief through unconventional means, traveling from Ohio to Alaska to Switzerland to Sudan to substantiate a theory of which Clifford’s colleagues are skeptical. As Frances discovers stories, landscapes, and customs she never imagined, she learns that while her grief is unique, she is never alone in it. The Good Echo celebrates the healing that can arise through sustained curiosity, and how our deepest sadness sometimes initiates the boldest adventures of our lives.

My essay collection, Glass, Light, and Electricity, won the 2019 Permafrost Prize in Nonfiction and was published by the University of Alaska Press in 2020. In May 2023, my story collection, We Are a Teeming Wilderness, will be published by Press 53.

My work is represented by Julie Stevenson at Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agency.