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 am at work on my second novel, WAIT., for which I won the 2o07 Evans Harrington Grant. My first novel, SONG OF BLACKBIRDS, was short-listed for the 2007 Faulkner-Wisdom Novel Award. I have won the Tony Bill Screenwriting Award (2002), the Robert Olen Butler Short Story Award (2001), and published in COUNTRY ROADS, WEB DEL SOL, DOUBLE DEALER, and EXQUISITE CORPSE.

In my work life, I have been everything from bagel baker to bartender, nanny to teacher, engineering intern to technical writer. During the last five years, I have taught writing at NYU, NJCU, and ASA CAP Columbia. I now teach writing and literature at SLCC in Lafayette,  where I live in a very old house with my husband, our dog, and our elderly black cat. .