Greetings, everyone. I'm so happy to be a part of this wonderful site! My fiction is represented by Stephanie Kip Rostan of the Levine Greenberg Agency. I'm a member of the full-time fiction and poetry faculty at Gotham Writers' Workshop, where I teach the Master Class in Fiction and--in the collaboration between GWW and Zoetrope: All-Story--Zoetrope Basic Fiction, Zoetrope Advanced Fiction, and the Zoetrope Master Class in Fiction. I'm also an assistant editor at Zoetrope: All-Story and have been nominated for eight Pushcart Prizes for my fiction and poetry, including, most recently, by In Posse Review for a novel excerpt on Diane Arbus. I earned my Ph.D. in English, fiction, and poetry from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the M.F.A. in poetry from Vermont College, the M.A. in English and fiction from San Jose State University, and the B.A. with Great Distinction in fine arts from San Jose State University.
As for my other credentials, my first book, The Carrington Monologues, has been published as the inaugural volume in the Literary Potpourri Poetry Series, has been nominated for several national writing awards, including the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, has received excellent reviews at Amazon.com, and has gone into reprints. My first novel, Marie, Marie: Hold on Tight, appeared in 2004 from Lit Pot Press, has been earning excellent reviews, and was discussed in the September 2005 issue of The Writer. My short story "The Stieglitz Series on O'Keeffe" was a Top-Three story at Zoetrope Virtual Studios (#1), as was "Christina's World" (#1), "The Map of His Damaged Face" (#1), "A Secret Life (with Mud and Worms Attached)" (#1), and "The Mind-Body Problem" (#1); "Sauna," "Brutal Helga," "The Dead Girl," "Dissolution," and "The Terror of School Buses"; a novella, "The Universal Alice," was a Top-Three novella (#1), as was "A Heaven Without Ghosts," "Bernadette Soubirous' Hair and Closed Eyes," and "Russian Roulette," which also earned the #1 position. I've also published short stories, novel excerpts, and poems in more than 850 journals, including TriQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, New York Stories, Puerto del Sol, New Delta Review, The Greensboro Review, NFG (forthcoming), Rattapallax (forthcoming), Night Train, and many others. My poetry has appeared in the anthology TriQuarterly New Writers, for which only five poets were selected. I've received, for my fiction and poetry, more than forty national writing awards, grants, scholarships, and fellowships, including the AWP Intro Award, seven RopeWalk fiction and/or poetry scholarships, the Vermont College Merit Scholarship, and Yaddo, Ucross, Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and Hambidge Art Center fellowships. My novel Marie, Marie: Hold on Tight received the Wesleyan Writers Conference Scholarship for the Novel, a RopeWalk Writers Retreat Scholarship, and was a finalist in several national novel competitions. A reading of my poetry and fiction was made into a televison program that has aired repeatedly in Nebraska, and I recently completed a radio interview on my fiction (where I was paired with Edna O'Brien) about visual artists with Jordan Rosenfeld for her "Word by Word" series that aired in 2004; I also participated with Jordan in a panel discussion of Marie, Marie: Hold on Tight on her program "Dysfictional Families."
In addition, my chapbook Rag Men won the first annual The Ledge Chapbook Competition and was published to excellent reviews in such journals as Cimarron Review and Onthebus, was a "Featured Pick" for Small Press Review, has gone into reprints at Spring Church Books, and is included in a rare-book collection at Ohio State University and in the "special books" library at Pudding House. A second chapbook, The Doll Artist's Daughter, was published by White Eagle Coffee Store Press.
I was a recent judge for long fiction in a national competition, the A.E. Coppard Prize.
