Link to: Personal Website

Phone:  464-1916

Office:  OC3020

I am Associate Professor of English and serve as Fiction Editor of Southern Indiana Review and Faculty Advisor to the Student Writers Union and Co-Director of the RopeWalk Visiting Writers Reading Series. My short stories and poems have been published in The Southern Review, Quarterly West, Meridian, Black Warrior Review, and Crab Orchard Review. My first novel, In the Breeze of Passing Things, is the story of pre-teen Iva Giles running after a dim glimmer of who her father used to be. My fiction has won awards from the Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner Short Story Competition, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Society, and Glimmer
Train. I hold an M.F.A. in creative writing from George Mason University.

I joined the English department in the fall of 2004 and am excited to be a part of the thriving Creative Writing program here at USI. Before my family settled in the Washington, D.C. area, I spent my early years moving--from Philadelphia to Chicago, Dallas to Appalachia--collecting the voices of characters who have come to populate my fiction. All I ever wanted was to sit still long enough to let a root find water; I'm looking forward to a good long drink here.

I live in Evansville with my husband, a deviance specialist in sociology, and toddling son Tolen who has way too many teeth for his own good.

I think lying should be considered one of the highest arts, and if I could have majored in The Artful Lie, I would have. To lie well, to lie about people in such a way as to tell the profoundest truth about the human condition, well that’s lightning bolts and bell towers. The good lie is spider’s silk. It’s faith healers and atomic fusion of the soul. The good lie changes who we are and what we’re willing to believe. About ourselves, about you, and about them. The artful lie of fiction can change the world.