I was born on a farm in the Ozark Mountains in Northwest Arkansas. As a kid, I spent time up and down the in-seam of America—Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, and always back to Arkansas. I attended Yale University and earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at the University of Iowa. For several years I was the literary editor of the Wilson Quarterly.

My fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Oxford American, the New Republic, Witness, the Belmont Story Review, Dark Yonder, and Full Bleed, among other publications. I have received generous support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Wildacres, and Pen Parentis, an organization for writers who are parents, which named me its 2023 Writing Fellow. I am currently at work on a rural noir novel set in the Ozarks, the first chapter of which was shortlisted for the Stockholm Writers Festival First 5 Pages Prize in 2024. A proud Bronx resident, I live with my husband and daughter, a cat, a dog, and a lot of unfinished stories. Sometimes, one of them gets an ending.