Writing

COLORADO REVIEW
Spring 2026

The bunny arrived at Easter, as many bunnies do, with a green fabric ribbon around its neck. I didn’t ask for it, my sister Aileen did. I let everyone know, even as I petted its twitching haunch, that I would take no responsibility for its care…

SOUTH CAROLINA REVIEW 
Spring 2026

Joanna asked me to go to Miami at my grandmother’s eightieth birthday party. She was back home in Des Moines, tan from her new life in South Carolina, no longer the pale, rosy girl who blew out my candles with me each year and guarded her bedroom door while I tried on her dresses in secret...

SALAMANDER
Winner, 2025 Salamander Fiction Prize

While our husbands were in meetings, we’d gone to visit the Black Madonna. We took a train away from the beaches and into some foothills, then a cable car over the steep rocky slope up to the monastery. It had the feel of pilgrimage, though we were only a few miles outside Barcelona…

GRANTA ONLINE

Rocket ship’s broken again on Course Two. I have it all in pieces on the turf, and I’m painting it again, with the NASA site up on my phone so I get the insignia in the right places…

INDIANA REVIEW
Issue 46.1 | Summer 2024

There are snakes in my mother’s sunflower patch. Last week, Sammie limped into the house and lost control of her bowels on the living room carpet. My dad screamed “Bad dog!” and kicked at her, but she didn’t run. She fell down in her filth and whimpered…

WITNESS
Spring 2023

EllyGal46 has 256K followers on TikTok. Half her videos are split-screen; she points and makes approving faces while a man on InfoWars or a woman in a sunny kitchen suggests vast conspiracy…

SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW
Notable, Best American Essays, 2023

The reception room at the fertility clinic is pleasant enough, white walls and blue chairs, a coffee urn, the tasteless mini-muffins served in corporate conference rooms. On the walls, framed magazine articles tout the success of Dr. Z, who will not be my doctor, but oversees this floor and the bigger one upstairs.

GRANTA ONLINE

The woman seated opposite Marta in the waiting room is laughing as she reads the folder of material for new patients. “Oh my God,” the woman keeps saying, followed by a giggle. “Wow”…

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
Spring 2020

By seven, Billy was already restless, awakened hours earlier by troublesome dreams. His fingers beat the kitchen table in time to a song that played only in his head. The green scent of July cornfields pushed through window screens and busy flies bumped their wings against the upper panes…

FOUR WAY REVIEW

This summer, all the kids call themselves Zion. They come one by one and hang on the fence behind the backboard, then drift in until they’re standing under the basket, waiting for the rebound off my shot…

SALAMANDER

We play games in the backseat, the children and me. It is bigger than a breadbox?  Smaller than a house?  Everyone’s a good sport before lunchtime but, by afternoon, our minds are tired and the games become more brutal…

NASHVILLE REVIEW

The power and heat had gone out near midnight and the apartment was freezing. I stood at our bay window in my flannel nightgown, three sweatshirts and Chuck Taylors I’d graffitied with Wite-Out phrases that meant nothing unless you were in on the joke…

JUKED
Spring 2015

Back then, I was a job counselor at a free training program for women who wanted to be construction workers. The women were convicts, college graduates, former addicts, former computer programmers…

BALTIMORE REVIEW
Summer 2014

We could do things in water we couldn’t on land. We flipped our bodies like Easter eggs in bowls of vinegar and food coloring. We conducted orchestras with our toes…