I grew up, for the most part, near Heidelberg, Germany in the riverside town of Neckarsteinach.

At 19, I returned to the US and enrolled in college a few years later. Unsure whether to study writing or psychology, and deciding psychology would be more lucrative, I headed toward a psych major. Then I realized I was paying for the classes and that I'd better take something I loved, so back to writing it was.

  I earned my MFA in creative writing in 2003 from Minnesota State University Moorhead, and the following year ended up publishing most of the stories I wrote for workshops.

 My fiction has been nominated for a  Pushcart Prize and was listed as a Million Writers Award selection of notable fiction. My short story "They Three at Once Were One," about a young woman whose boyfriend's death in Iraq may or may not have been playing on live news feed as she watched from behind the front desk of a hotel,  won the 2006 Storyglossia Fiction Prize.

 I taught expressive writing, playwriting, and screenwriting at Trollwood Performing Arts School in Fargo, ND, and was an adjunct English professor at Austin Peay State University in TN. I spent a year as a reporter for the Journal Inquirer newspaper in Connecticut and am currently a Women's eNews correspondent.

In 2007, I founded and currently co-edit  Tuesday Shorts, which has published original work by Richard Grayson, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Kris Saknussemm, Carol Snow, and a number of other quality writers. I am also editor of American Fiction.

 My first novel, Homefront, published in 2007 to favorable critical and reader reviews. I'm now at work on my second novel, The Year of Dan Palace, and married to a man I wooed in high school by slipping secret admirer notes into his locker.