Etsy

I am a visual artist and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. I grew up in Maryland, went to Pomona College in Claremont, California, and then moved to the city to pursue a doctoral program in English literature at NYU. I taught writing and literature at NYU for many years, and in 2009 I completed my Ph.D. with a dissertation on the fiction of David Foster Wallace.

This past year I was a winter fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I have also been awarded residencies at Blue Mountain Center, in the Adirondacks, and at Hall Farm Center in Vermont.

My short stories have appeared in literary magazines such as The Antioch Review, Conjunctions, Epoch, New England Review, One Story, Post Road, Shenandoah, Tin House, and TriQuarterly. These stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times, and my book-length collection of stories was a finalist in the Iowa Short Fiction Awards.

I began making mixed-media assemblages in 2002. I collect my materials from a variety of places: beaches in Florida and California, the Suffolk coast of England and the west coast of Ireland; mountain forests and salt marshes; antique shops in rural Pennsylvania or Georgia, Antwerp or Prague; and often I find things near the sidewalk on my own street. I make my artwork in kitchens, screen porches and basements in Brooklyn, Maryland and Florida.

My collections and the assemblages they go into are guided by what I read, what I dream, what I happen to observe or remember. Each one is a unique experiment that requires enormous care, planning, and always elements of chance and surprise.