Bio
I was born and raised in southern Missouri’s “Bootheel” region, an isolated, backwater area that sits alongside the Mississippi River, just north of the Arkansas border, the only girl in a family of rowdy boys. My favorite things growing up were new notebooks, pencils and pens, and going to school. Determined to leave the life my mother had endured, I left the family farm after high school (without my father’s permission) to go to the regional college, thirty miles away. I never looked back, and I never apologized.
In college, I found my calling to teach and write. After receiving my degrees in Illinois and Indiana, I taught at the university level in Idaho, Missouri, and North Carolina. My favorite areas to teach are women’s literature and folklore, as well as ethnographic research, which means I teach and demonstrate to my students how to work within various communities of people, listening carefully to how they make meaning in their lives through stories, traditions, and rituals that embody their beliefs and practices, and how they pass on those values to the next generation.
My own research and writing have been devoted to the study of women’s stories (both literary and oral), largely because, as in most things, women’s voices have never been honored and respected the way men’s voices have been. I spent time listening to woman talk about their faith journeys in charismatic churches, worked in a women’s shelter in Missouri, hearing the harrowing stories of women living in hiding with their children, attempting to escape the violence in their own homes, and recorded the stories of Black women (and men) in southern Missouri as they recounted how the government flooded and destroyed their beloved town in order to save the land of wealthy white landowners. Through all of these experiences, I have become a committed advocate for gendered and racial equality and the right of all persons to tell their own stories. It is my belief that all their stories matter and should be taken into account by those in power, who make the laws and enforce them.
Along the way, I had my own struggles with being taken seriously as a female professor and with balancing my work life and my personal life. While teaching full time and publishing like a crazy person, I also raised a son and two daughters, each of whom have developed into functioning human beings with kind hearts and generous spirits. I could not be more thankful for that to be true. Of course, I didn’t do this by myself. I have been fortunate to have amazing senior female mentors to support and encourage me, dear friends to kept me sane, and a wonderfully kind and generous partner, who has helped make it all possible.
In 2020, during the pandemic, I left Missouri to write fiction full time in North Carolina. Having left academics and all the requirements of that life, there is nothing I enjoy more than a quiet morning on my tiny deck in the woods with a cup of rich black coffee. The deck is also my favorite place to read and write. My fiction writing is inspired by the voices of the women I have heard tell their personal stories over the years, and by new ones I hear every day, stories that illustrate how our society still does not value or protect women’s experiences, no matter our religion, our sexual orientation, our race, our class, our marital status, our physical and mental abilities, or our ethnicity. More than anything, I strive to write fiction that is realistic and true to our current social and cultural moment.
My hope is that my books will be chosen for book groups with both women and men reading, thinking, discussing, and challenging the situations and experiences of the characters in my books.
What’s next? My second novel, BURN DOWN THE HOUSE, is currently in revision and should appear sometime in 2027. Stay tuned!
