Bio
I spent the first eighteen years of my life in a Minnesotan town of 411 people (or 413 if the sign as one entered from the opposite direction were to be believed—the two signs disagreed by two residents throughout most of my childhood). Though I left as soon as I graduated from high school, I find that my writing is deeply influenced by this place. We had one television station, internet had not been invented yet, and we rarely left town, so I grew up fairly isolated but wanting to know absolutely everything about people and the world. In fact, to this day, I find a lack of curiosity unforgivable.
As a child, I attempted to access the world through reading. The other day, my partner and I attempted to calculate how many hours of non-required reading we had done by the time we graduated from high school; we determined that a safe estimate was well over 15,000 hours for each of us. I approached reading almost like a job: during the school year, I ‘worked' part-time (25+ hours of reading a week), and during the summer, I was a full-time reader (easily 40 hours a week). When I finished graduate school in 1991, I wanted to learn about the world firsthand. I moved to Spain, and from there, traveled frequently to Morocco and other places. Traveling has been one of the biggest pleasures and teachers in my life; half of the stories in my first collection, The Bigness of the World, are set abroad. Though I have spent much of my adult life in Albuquerque, where I initially moved to attend graduate school, I love to move. I have lived in Moorhead, Minnesota; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Madrid, Spain; Malacca, Malaysia; and now San Francisco. I find the sense of freedom that accompanies the initial period of newness and anonymity highly stimulating and conducive to creativity.
I have worked as a teacher most of my life, with the exception of the seven years that my partner and I owned and operated a furniture and antique business called Two Serious Ladies. Over the years, I have taught college writing, ESL to foreigners, GMAT and GRE preparation to Spaniards, SAT preparation to high school students at Madrid's American School, and business communications to Malaysians. Currently, I teach transitional (developmental) English and story writing at the Art Institute of California-San Francisco.
I took a rather circuitous route to becoming a writer. I did not do an MFA program, though my intention was always to be a writer. My first story collection, The Bigness of the World, won the 2008 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and was published in the fall of 2009. Stories from it appeared in The Georgia Review, New England Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Bellingham Review, Hobart, and Blue Mesa Review. In the summer of 2009, I learned that I had been chosen for a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a $25,000 grant that allowed me to take time off from teaching in order to finish my novel, tentatively entitled After the Parade.
Update:
Since the collection's release, it has received the California Book Award for First Fiction and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award. It was a Lambda finalist, and The Story Prize named it a 2009 Notable Book. The collection is currently on the shortlist for the 2010 Saroyan International Prize for Writing and the longlist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Two stories have received special honors: "All Boy," first published in New England Review, was selected for the 2010 Best American Short Stories, and "Idyllic Little Bali" received the Lawrence Foundation Award, a prize of $1,000 given to the best story published in Prairie Schooner in 2009. In August 2010, I will attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference as a fellow. I will spend the 2010-11 academic year as the Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill.
For my official bio, see Media Kit.
