I grew up in upstate New York and didn’t know any writers. My report card in High School English reads “Lacks Self Control” and “Attitude in class is poor” and I graduated with terrible grades, later dropping out of community college. That said, I loved reading and journaling more than anything. In 2006, I moved to Williamsburg Brooklyn and worked as a barista, nanny, waitress, and shopgirl. In 2008 I took a creative writing class at Gotham Writers Workshop, and loved it and continued with memoir writing classes, taking three more at Gotham and then working one-on-one with Melissa Febos, who was teaching there at the time.

The internet was like the wild wild west back then and I began binge-submitting my essays all over. To meet other writers, I started a reading series out of my dad’s apartment, Hudson River Loft Reading Series, which featured writers such as Jillian Lauren, Melissa Febos, and Courtney Maum.

I published my first book when I was twenty-six, in April 2012, through a micro press called Future Tense Books. The following year, I hloe wrote my novella Women, showed it to my friend Elizabeth Ellen, the founder and editor of Short Flight / Long Drive, who published the book in 2014.

I gathered rejections from the Big Five publishers for my next essay collection, titled, I’ll Tell You in Person. It later found a home as one of the first of the Emily Books imprint under Coffee House books.

In 2020, I sold my memoir, The Red Zone: a Love Story to Soft Skull. In 2022 I sold her book Trying to Graywolf for publication in 2025. In 2023, Harper Perennial bought the rights to Women which will release in June 2024.

Throughout the chaos of trying to find the right homes for my books, I’ve hosted retreats and was the instructor at Writing Workshops Paris in 2022 and 2023. I’ve been around the block teaching writing for years, you may have crossed paths with me at Litreactor, Corporeal Writing, Catapult, or Write or Die Tribe. I’ve also volunteered at youth centers and afterschool programs to mentor teenagers in creative writing at Hudson Hall, The Chatham Library, Perfect 10, The Promise, and Kite’s Nest.

For the past decade, I’ve lived in Hudson New York.

Photos by JD Urban