I write to resist silence. I write and teach to help others find freedom and tell their stories.
My essays can be found in Blackbird, The Chattahoochee Review, Consequence, CutBank, Gastronomica, Hunger Mountain Review, Indiana Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, McSweeney’s, The Southeast Review, Vox, War, Literature, & the Arts, and elsewhere.
I was a finalist for the 2021 Chautauqua Janus Prize, and winner of the 2020 Indiana Review Creative Nonfiction Prize and the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Rafael Torch Nonfiction Award. My work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
I have been a writer-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, Newnan ArtRez, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and am a 2016 St. Botolph Emerging Artist Award winner. To aid the completion of my memoir, I have also received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emerson College, the Somerville Arts Council, and The College of William & Mary.
Three of my essays have been named Notables in The Best American Essays series.
I earned my M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College, and my B.A. in English from the University of Central Florida.
I taught writing and literature for nearly a decade in Boston: at Emerson College, GrubStreet, Harvard University, and in shelters and post incarceration and addiction recovery centers, for Writers Without Margins.
Born and raised in Miami, FL, I now live with my partner and cat in Virginia, where I’m an Associate Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at William & Mary.
