Welcome
As a writer and artist, my interest is in the fabric of ritual and routine that wraps our lives. My curiosity goes to where and how we stand in the world and to our individual and collective balance and imbalance, connection and disconnection. I’m drawn to the intricacies of character and relationship between and across people, places, and histories.
And questions, always so many, many questions . . . How is memory constructed, shaped, and reshaped? How do our willful or inadvertent actions or the happenstance of time and place—or the tangle of it all—sustain or destroy? What can we learn about joy, sorrow, courage, cowardice, accident, design, good, evil, and all manner of emotion and action rooted in our messy and fascinating human natures?
I live and write in Madison, WI, among the lakes and farms and four seasons. My story, “His Mother’s Eyes,” was a runner-up for the 2013 Nelson Algren Prize. In 2011, I was Writer-in-Residence at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. Grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Rowland Foundation, Ragdale, and the Vermont Studio Center have supported my writing—as has my work as an independent researcher and writer on issues of gender-based violence. My novel, These Things Happen, was short listed for the 2017 Del Sol Press First Novel Prize and a semi-finalist for the Black Lawrence Press 2017 Big Moose Prize.