I grew up in Northern New York, on the Canadian border. A speech-and-debate kid who memorized statistics for fun and played any sport on offer. The arguing-and-systems half of that turned into a twenty-year career in strategy consulting and public policy, with stints at McKinsey & Company and the U.S. Department of Energy. I learned to read institutions from the inside—how they decide, who they protect, what they ask of the people who serve them.

Away from the work, I read fiction widely. And quietly, for years, I was writing it too. The head I had spent decades filling with useless information was, for a novelist, exactly the right kind of head.

I wrote my first novel in stolen hours before work, in hotel rooms, on bleachers wherever the youth-activity industrial complex sent me. That novel lives in a fireproof safe now. It demystified the process and taught me the discipline of showing up regardless of conditions. My second novel I took from first draft to the manuscript I’m querying as a debut.

The stories I love best treat ordinary lives with close attention and some bite. I return again and again to Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, Alice McDermott, Jonathan Franzen, and George Saunders. I’m also drawn to novels with structural ambition—where the form is doing as much work as the prose: A Visit from the Goon Squad, Cloud Cuckoo Land, Trust, The Bee Sting.

I live in Washington, DC, with my family, where I work a day job in climate and energy policy. I am active in the local literary community through the DC Writers Salon, Friends of the DC Public Library, and the Writer's Center. I hold a B.A. from Plattsburgh College (SUNY) and a Master of Public Policy from George Mason University.