About

I am from the Tennessee Valley and as much as I’ve tried to shake the southern it won’t leave–my kitchen, my accent, my writing all give me away. I love the South, even when it breaks my heart.

In 2016, I finally quit the corporate world after giving it a shot for 19 years. My writing background includes business communications, fiction, narrative non-fiction, and food writing, and I’ve led various writing workshops.

At present, I live in a little blue house in Chattanooga, TN. I received my B.A. in English from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and my M.F.A. from Vermont College of Fine Arts. In 2017, I co-founded The Hemlock Review, a fine arts magazine for the Chattanooga School of the Arts & Sciences community. I read fiction for Cutbank Literary Journal, and I write novels, essays, and short stories. 

In June 2019, I served as a Teaching Assistant for The Writer’s Hotel Conference in NYC. From December 2020 through February 2021, I was the writer-in-residence at the Kerouac House in Orlando. I teach composition at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga as well as creative writing to formerly incarcerated individuals recovering from addiction through SoLit’s Turn the Page program. I also work as a workshop facilitator (for creative writing and for Narrative 4), editor, and manuscript consultant. In December 2025, I was selected to serve as a mentor in PEN America’s Prison Writing program.