BIO
I am a trained journalist and author. My work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine and elsewhere. In 2016, I received the prestigious Whiting Award for Creative Nonfiction, which allowed me to finish my first book, THE YELLOW HOUSE (Grove Press). I received my undergraduate degree in anthropology and mass communications from the University of North Texas before earning a Master’s degree in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. I began my writing career as a newspaper journalist working in Rhode Island, Dallas, New Orleans and Hong Kong (for TIME Asia). I worked as an editor at O, The Oprah Magazine for several years, writing in the hours before and after work. In the years following, I’ve worked extensively in the nonprofit word, including as Executive Director of the global nonprofit, Village Health Works, which has offices in Burundi and New York. I’ve taught nonfiction in Columbia University’s creative writing department. I love solitude, travel, making a beautiful room and the possibility of getting lost. I am a native New Orleanian, the youngest of twelve children. I make a home in New York City.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My writing attempts to fill in the “blank spaces” on the map, to redraw a map that includes those neighborhoods and streets and cities whose people are deemed not to matter, whose voices do not make it onto the official recording, those made to play supporting when they are, in fact, lead. My attention rests on those places that mapmakers often deem “too young for history.” I write into these grottos, excavating and uncovering the arresting detail that together tell the story of people and places. This has been my obsession – this attention to what goes missing from a story or mythology – since childhood, growing up in New Orleans on a street which felt cut off from the rest of the city and thus, the world.
I have always been driven by the gnawing questions that have to do with identity and belonging, with displacement, migration and uprootedness. I'm interested, therefore, in geography and place, in family and home. I think of those spaces where we exist (our inheritance) as distinct from where we feel we belong (identity).
Literary Representation:
Suzanne Gluck
sgluck@wmeagency.com
Publicity:
Michael Taeckens
Justina Batchelor