I write fiction and nonfiction and teach creative writing and literature. I am an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; previously, I was an assistant professor of English at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and the College of Wooster in Ohio. I continue to run the the online eco-writing literary journal The Dodge, which is based at Wooster.

I have a M.A. in English/creative writing and a Ph.D. in English (specializing in eighteenth-century British literature) from the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a B.A. in Classical Studies from Smith College. My dissertation research was supported by an AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship and a PEO Scholar Award.

My novel Alcestis, a retelling of the Greek myth, was published by Soho Press in 2010 and will be reissued on September 5, 2023. Alcestis won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award from the Publishing Triangle in 2011 and was also a finalist for a Lesbian Debut Fiction Award from the Lambda Literary Association and the BSFS Compton Crook Award. In 2021, I received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. My second novel, Killingly, a New England Gothic novel describing the aftermath of a student’s disappearance from Mt. Holyoke College in 1897, was published by Soho Crime in June 2023 (and by Corvus in the UK).

I’m also working on a novel about climate change protests and environmental justice. My writing has appeared in Tinfish, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Toast, Humanities, and other publications. When I can, I’m an organizer and volunteer, working for environmental and social justice and animal rescue.

My academic research has focused primarily on the writing lives of a group of early eighteenth-century women writers, and my academic interests include environmental writing, disability studies, queer studies, literary history and historiography, life writing, genre fiction, animal studies, and textual studies.

My pronouns are she/her/hers.