ABOUT
I've worked as a Jones Lecturer
in Fiction at Stanford
University
since 2003. I teach workshop-style classes at the beginning,
intermediate, and advanced levels, as well as a class I recently
developed “Fiction for Film,” which is a bridge class between
fiction writing and screenwriting. I've also developed a number
of projects to build on the community of the writing program,
including The Four
Minute Reading, which brings together writing students,
faculty, Stegner Fellows, and Stanford visiting writers for
evenings of poetry and fiction. My fellow Jones Lecturers and I
have held publishing and writing seminars, as well as an
experimental class called the Novel Salon.
My book
The Creative
Writing MFA Handbook is published by Continuum Publishing
(February 2006). The book is a guide for prospective
graduate writing students and provides advice about choosing
programs, the application process, and making the most of the
graduate experience.
My story collection
Coyotes won the 2005
Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco
Foundation.
My stories have been published
in many places over the last five years. "Bones" was in both
Best American Non-Required and Prairie
Schooner. Other fiction has appeared in Story
Quarterly, Glimmer
Train, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the Indiana
Review. Some of my first publications were in
Mid-American Review, Ascent, and Gulf Coast,
and part of my novel-in-progress was published in The
San Francisco Chronicle in 2004.
I am close to completing a
novel entitled The Winged Girl.
I was previously a
Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, where I completed my
story collection and worked on the draft of a novel. The Stegner
Fellows meet throughout the year in an advanced
MFA-style workshop. I taught adult fiction
writers in the Continuing Studies Program, and I was also a
teaching assistant for 20th Century Fiction where we studied the
work of Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, William Faulkner,
Américo Paredes, Ernest
Hemingway, and Don DeLillo. I also assisted in Jane
Austen Into Film and worked with undergraduates one-on-one
through the Levinthal Tutorials.
In San
Francisco I spend some of my time at
826 Valencia, a
volunteer organization that tutors middle and high school
students. Recently I've been working with the the
Leadership High School
project. We work with students and their class writing
portfolios. Drop-in tutoring is Wednesdays for me. Another group
I work with is OneBrick.
We volunteer our minds and muscle to The Food Bank and various
landscape projects in Golden Gate
Park and
Bernal Heights.
I've also worked with the writers in schools project at
Los Altos High School.
My time in the
MFA program at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst brought a variety of
experiences and opportunities. Before earning my degree in 2002,
I taught everything there. Creative writing, fiction
writing, American Diversity, college writing, and even
photography. My story collection, at the time in-progress and
titled Groundskeeping, was a finalist for the Iowa Fiction
Award. In my last year at UMass, I won the
Distinguished Teaching Award, which honors five teachers at
the university for excellence in the classroom.
In my various classes we
studied the work of Mary Ellen Mark, James Baldwin, Jonathan
Kozol, and W. Eugene Smith, among others. In the American
Diversity class we took a close look at Ralph Ellison's Writer's
Project in the 1930's WPA. My creation, The Dreaded Research
Paper, was used for years by instructors in college writing. I
also wrote the successful grant for the
Writers-in-the-Schools project for the MFA
program, bringing graduate students to rural high schools in
western Massachusetts.
I was selected as a Visiting
Scholar at the
Breadloaf
Writer's Conference in 2003. Throughout the years, including
my undergraduate time at the
University of North Carolina
at Greensboro, I've
taken writing classes with Fred Chappell, John Edgar Wideman,
Elizabeth Tallent, James Tate, John L'Heureux, Noy Holland and
Sam Michel, Peter Turchi, D.R. MacDonald, and Tobias Wolff.
Before graduate school I worked
for the Center for Creative Leadership, a management training
non-profit, as a research assistant and as a business writer. I
was also the editor-in-chief at Cities and Roads,
North Carolina's Journal of Short
Fiction for three years.
My goals for the foreseeable
future are to write a nonfiction book in 2006, to finish The
Winged Girl, to continue to teach at the university level and to
continue my work with website design and secondary school and
undergraduate community initiatives.
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