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 in the community.

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 serve as a fiction and occasional contest reader at a number of literary journals, 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 and rhetoric at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. For several years, I worked with 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. Since December 2025, I have served as a mentor in PEN America’s Prison Writing program. 

All thoughts presented on this site and in my writing are my own and are not in any way affiliated with any programs or institutions.