About Me
Currently Writer in Residence at Fordham University, I was born in Cambridge, England and raised there as well as in the American South and Maine. I published five books in the 1990's before changing course to take a full-time college teaching position and raise three young children. In the past few years I have begun writing again in earnest.My novels include The Way Life Should Be, Desire Lines and Sweet Water. My essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Yale Review, Southern Living, Ms., Parents, and Family Life, among other places.As a freelance editor and writing consultant, I have written, edited, copyedited, and consulted on dozens of novels, nonfiction books, book proposals, magazine articles, and grant proposals. I haveedited works by many writers, including Susan Cheever, Mona Simpson, Jon Katz, Naomi Wolf, Allegra Goodman, and Judy Goldman. My in-house experience includes editorial positions at the literary magazines Granta and Callaloo.I have taught fiction and non-fiction writing, poetry, English literature, literary theory, and women’s studies at Yale, NYU, Fordham, the University of Virginia, and Drew University. I am a graduate of Yale (B.A.), Cambridge University (M.A.), and the University of Virginia (M.F.A.), where I was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing. Most recently, I was a 2005 recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship and a Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I serve on the advisory board of LandEscapes, a Maine arts group, and donate my time and editing skills to a number of organizations in New Jersey and Maine. I have also worked as a caterer, cook, and personal chef on the Maine coast, Martha’s Vineyard, and in Charlottesville, Virginia.I live in an old house in Montclair, New Jersey, with my husband and three boys; and Lucy, an English Springer Spaniel. I spend summers with extended family in an even older house on Mount Desert Island in Maine.
