I write fiction about ordinary lives shaped by place and by the institutions that hold or fail them.
I came to fiction midway through a two-decade career of reading systems for a living—how decisions actually get made, who carries the weight, where the official story and the actual story part ways. Fiction is the form that lets me stay with the people inside those systems.
I’m drawn to family sagas and to quieter novels, and especially to fiction that earns its architecture, where the shape of the telling is part of the meaning.
I’m querying my debut novel, with a second underway. I live in Washington, DC with my family and a standard poodle named Almanzo.