Writing

Redivider recently published a lyric essay, “If Birds Can’t Survive,” that braids my experiences learning how to parent with learning how to birdwatch at a time when climate change is threatening America’s birds, and so much more, with extinction.

“What will we do with our fear?” This is the question that stands out to me from Eula Biss’s book, On Immunity. And it’s the question I returned to postpartum as I felt fear and frustration over anti-vaccine sentiment. I re-read Biss’s book during the most recent measles outbreak and found it to be as…Read More

I’m so delighted that my essay “Drawing a Breath” was included in the just published anthology Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays (University Press of Colorado, 2017). The essay originally appeared in Prairie Schooner (Vol. 90, Issue 2). Hugest thanks to editor Stephanie G’Schwind at the Colorado State University Center for Literary Publishing for her editorial role in shaping such…Read More

I’m grateful to the editors of Prairie Schooner for publishing my essay, “Drawing a Breath” and for awarding it the Bernice Slote Award for the best work by a beginning writer.

An excerpt: “Sensitivities bared, I made myself a lightning rod. For sunshine lost to cloud cover. For heat’s remove, cold creep of goosebumps on skinned knees. For wind around me. For leaves in the crabapple tree gone twitching, a receipt cartwheeling the street, quick-winged robin flight, the rose bush by the split-rail fence giving up…Read More

Find the full text of “Ossification,” winner of the 2015 Michael Steinberg Essay Prize, in Issue 18 of Fourth Genre. An excerpt: “On Saturday mornings, my mother used to wake us with the radio and the sound of the vacuum cleaner while my father started the lawnmower in the backyard; pollen drifted in the screens of my…Read More