Who I Am

I was born in Massachusetts in 1970, but spent most of my life in the South. I studied literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at the University of New Orleans. Among other things, I’ve been a cook on oil rigs and barges, a bouncer at a strip club, and a bartender in New Orleans.

My first book – North American Lake Monsters: stories — will be coming out in the summer of 2013 from Small Beer Press. Several of the stories have been reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies. One of them, called “The Monsters of Heaven,” won a Shirley Jackson Award.

Now I live in Asheville, NC, with my daughter in an apartment across from the French Broad River. Freight trains pass by my window at night.