For more than three years, I have been working on a book of hybrid essays that blend research, literary theory, and personal experience. Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity explores my peripatetic childhood as the daughter of two American Foreign Service Officers. Born in Italy, I grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and […]
»MoreSo, my third book, Stateside, is now a one-act opera composed by Rachel Whelan! The piece will premiere this Sunday, April 24 at 5 pm CST on YouTube (the pandemic interfered with the possibility of a live performance). It’s hard for me to express how touched I am that this book has been transformed into […]
»MoreIn Civilians, my current in-progress poetry manuscript, there are number of poems that function as small family portraits. This is a book that explores what it means for a service member to retire and to finally leave the military, reentering civilian life; many of the poems in the collection examine the distance between the experience […]
»MoreIn August 2022, Columbia University Press will publish Taste: A Book of Small Bites, my second nonfiction book. Taste looks at the sweet, the sour, the bitter, the salty, and umami through an interdisciplinary lens and considers the ways that this often overlooked sense informs poetry and fiction, theater, film, opera, philosophy, and religion. You […]
»MoreSo, for the past 18 months, I’ve spent my free time earning an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, also known as VCFA. I officially graduated today, a newly minted (or reminted?) MFA. I earned my MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2003, and my […]
»MoreMy next nonfiction book, Taste: A Book of Small Bites, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in August 2022. The book looks at the sweet, the sour, the bitter, the salty, and umami through an interdisciplinary lens, considering the ways that taste informs poetry and fiction, theater, film, opera, philosophy, and religion. You can read […]
»MoreWell, I guess Taste: A Book of Small Bites is really going to be a real book! I was excited to see that it’s included in Columbia University Press’s spring 2022 catalog. It looks like there are some fabulous books coming out next year, and I am so grateful that Taste will be in such […]
»MoreWhen I first decided to become really serious about my training in creative nonfiction, I took a series of online courses through the literary journal Creative Nonfiction. The classes were excellent and offered me exactly the kind of education that I lacked in my fumbling-solitary-efforts-to-figure-out-what-an-essay-was. I loved these online courses for their interesting, imaginative writing […]
»MoreI adore River Teeth, which publishes some of my favorite nonfiction being written today. And I especially love “Beautiful Things,” the journal’s weekly column featuring flash nonfiction pieces under 250. So, it was a real thrill to have a tiny essay titled “Brood” accepted for “Beautiful Things.” If you’re interested, you can read it here. […]
»MoreWhen I was a child, I believed that we had a day off from school on Veterans Day because this was also my birthday. But, now, as an adult, this day has a different meaning, because my husband is a veteran. I’ve written extensively about his service in my books, Stateside (2010) and Dots & […]
»MoreEven though 2022 still feels very far away, my second book of creative nonfiction, Taste: A Book of Small Bites, is now available for pre-order at Columbia University Press! You can find information about the book here. And, if you decide to purchase a copy of the book, using the discount code “CUP20” in the […]
»MoreIt’s hard to keep track of time these days. It amazes me to think that, barely a year ago, I began working on an interdisciplinary project called Taste: A Book of Small Parts. Divided into five sections–the sweet, the salty, the sour, the bitter, and the umami–Taste is comprised of dozens of tiny essays, each […]
»MoreI’m thrilled to have a new essay in West Branch, one of my very favorite literary journals. “You Must Stumble” is part of my manuscript-in-progress, Exhibitions, a book of essays about my nomadic upbringing as the daughter of two American diplomats. Most of the pieces in Exhibitions examine works of art–paintings, art glass, photographs–as a […]
»MoreI’m thrilled to have a poem from my latest collection, Wild Kingdom, appear today on Poetry Daily. “Portrait of an Administrator with Strategic Plan and Office Supplies” is one of many portraits that appear in the book: clear-eyed, precise sketches of the difficult, discomfiting characters who often populate the thorny landscape of academia. You can […]
»MoreI am always extremely grateful to have poems featured in the syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry, which was started by my mentor and former teacher, Ted Kooser, and has now been taken over by poet Kwame Dawes. This time, the poem is “[Sometimes we wonder what unfailing means],” the first sonnet in a […]
»MoreThe Colorado Review is one of my favorite literary journals. A while back, they published one of my essays about art from nonfiction book project, Exhibitions. The essay was called “Portrait on Metal with Patterned Scarf and Streak of Light” and was later named as a notable essay in Best American Essays. So, it was […]
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