Hello! I write creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, journalism, memoir, and some poetry and other genres.

My eight books (links below) include Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System, a book of essays on chronic pain, which was a Foreword “Indie Next” Book of the Year and Silver Medal Award Winner and received the Independent Publishers’ Association Gold Medal for General Excellence; it has been called “important, luminous, and necessary,” and was named by the New Stateman as a Best Book of 2018. Other books include Love & Industry: A Midwestern Workbook, Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto, and Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir in a Day. 

My work has been published in literary journals and magazines including The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Fourth Genre, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Washington Post Magazine. I’m a professor in the Department of English at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield Low-Residency MFA Program. You can find more of my online essays and commentary here. My essays have won the 2012 Terrain.org Award in Nonfiction and are included in True Stories, Well Told: From the First Twenty Years of Creative Nonfiction; other essay have been named Notable in the Best American Essays in 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2019.

You can read more about me here and get in touch here.