I was raised on the outskirts of Baton Rouge Louisiana by ex-hippie parents who introduced me to Thoreau and Lewis Carroll and Frank Zappa at an impressionable age. My mother sewed and sang and grew flowers and vegetables. My father read SCIENCE magazine and told evasive stories about Woodstock. (“If you remember it,” he once said, “you didn’t deserve to be there.”) They sent me to traditional Chinese art lessons (hello, Mrs. Chen) and kept me in notebooks, which I filled with soap operas about parallel worlds and spaceships, and poems about dragons and comets. 

Flash forward two decades, and I have Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in creative writing from LSU, and an MFA from NYU in fiction. I recently completed my second novel, WAIT., for which I won the 2007 Faulkner Society's Novel-in-Progress Award. I have won the Tony Bill Screenwriting Award (2002), the Robert Olen Butler Short Story Award (2001), and my work has been published or is forthcoming in COUNTRY ROADS, WEB DEL SOL, DOUBLE DEALER, and EXQUISITE CORPSE. My first novel, SONG OF BLACKBIRDS, was short-listed for the 2007 Faulkner-Wisdom Novel Award.

During the last five years, I have taught writing at NYU, NJCU, and ASA CAP Columbia. I now teach writing and literature in Lafayette,  where I live in a hundred-year-old cypress cottage with my husband, our border collie, and our two black cats. .