Writing

For my short fiction, I have received three Hopwood Awards, a Cornelia Carhart Ward Fellowship, and was selected as a finalist for the Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing Fellowships, and the 2019 American Literary Review Fiction Contest. My short story “The Lamentations” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and my unpublished novel manuscript Brides was named First Runner-Up in the 2020 James Jones First Novel Fellowship.

I am currently at work on a new novel, A Woman of My Same Name. Rebecca Valentine has just moved back in with her parents, to whom she is closeted, when she begins to receive misdirected emails addressed to a “Mrs. Valentine” who lives in Belfast with her husband and child. Rebecca pieces together this parallel life email by email—reminders for dentist’s appointments, receipts from online shopping, even plane tickets—while her own life closes in around her: from her mother’s depression, to her brother’s drug use and suicide attempts, to the married ex-girlfriend who won’t quite let her go, there seems to be no way out except into the identity of her unwitting doppelganger.