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 will be published by Continuum Publishing in March 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 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 very 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 blog, The Daily Pick, is regularly updated.
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 continue to teach at the university level and to continue my work with website design and secondary school and undergraduate community initiatives.