I was deeply honored in January 2025 when Press 53 nominated me for a Pushcart Prize. The nomination was for a short story called...

It's official! THE TRAIN TO SANTA FE, my third novel, will be released by the amazing Regal House Publishing on August 26, 2026. I'm...

Snakes of St. Augustine was released by Regal House Publishing on September 12, 2023. (Order here.) Reviews can be found here: Southern...

Check out my review of Carla Rachel Sameth's darkly humorous collection of pandemic-era poems, What is Left. The review appears on the...

I'm honored and thrilled to work with Regal House Publishing (RHP) -- an independent, traditional publisher with a stellar reputation for...

WASHOUT -- The sea turtle eggs, round and pale as golf balls, gaped from the side of the dune where the overheated, angry ocean had...

The fearless woman who helped demolish my garage cabinets was crouched on my staircase, painting the walls when I asked if her partner, a...

Jake Wolff recently won the Internet. Wolff, a creative writing professor, editor and director of The Florida Review, and author of The...

Looming from her second-floor balcony, the owner confronted me, twitchy as a highlighted chicken. “You weren’t expecting to come inside,...

2020 unleashed a global pandemic, wildfires, hurricanes, and many bad DIY haircuts, but on Oct. 17, a nice thing happened. I won a gold...

This essay was written while my daughter was still in Nepal: When my boyfriend Mickey first hurled the slice of cooked Italian sausage...

Months before the brutal police killing of George Floyd, before the protests when I made a sign saying, “I Can’t Breathe” and "Stop the...

Editor’s Note: I wrote this travelogue-style essay in November 2018, while visiting my daughter Caroline during her service with Peace...

My friend Alan as a young boy, standing on his uncle's shoulders in Brazil, ready to leap into his future, with many cousins in the...

Is it a freshwater pond? If so, is the water stagnant and murky, or clear, with light dancing on its surface? Maybe the body of water is...

Whenever I’m learning a new skill – let’s say, how to properly document a sea turtle nest, surf tiny waves, or make toast without burning...

“It’s just that my protagonist doesn’t want her brother to die,” I told a traveling companion at a café in Kathmandu. “I think it might...

The struggle was real. After reading my forthcoming novel, City in a Forest , an editor pointed out that one of my characters seemed to...

In my third novel, Seeing Gethin, my protagonist’s brother is crazy about snakes—brown, red, spotted, striped, harmless, venomous, or...

My goal, in this nonfiction essay, was to provide a first-hand report on what Russ Douthat described in The New York Times as the 1970s...