I was born in Washington, D.C., moved with my family to Florida at age five, and grew up on the Atlantic coast, close to the beach. The ocean, long walks on the sand, and eventually, skipping school to drive central Florida’s back roads, fed my imagination and the desire to lead a creative life. My obsessions were music, reading and writing.

At first, music won out. I studied clarinet performance, played in orchestras and chamber groups, and collaborated with composers on new, experimental works. Then came opportunities to write about music, which led to years of arts journalism, magazine work, editing, book writing, and teaching.

I was a professor of music history and English at the University of Wyoming, and founding director of UW’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Following UW, I was a professor of creative writing at the the University of North Texas, and editor of the American Literary Review. I have worked as a librettist as well, having written nine commissioned musical texts, from songs to operas.

In 2014, with the support of the Bartlett Foundation, I left my teaching post in Texas to research and write The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Author of “The Yearling.” Previous fellowships and residencies have come from the Rockefeller Foundation, Cornell University, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the National Park Service, the Jentel Foundation, the Hambidge Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and others. Degrees: Florida State and the University of Michigan (music), University of Houston (creative writing). I live outside Asheville, NC with my husband Ken Gerow, a statistician, and our brilliant Australian Shepherd, Cora.

My current projects include The Devil’s Dream, an opera with composer Mara Gibson (2026 premiere) and oral history work for Come Hell or High Water, the Buncombe County Public Library Special Collections Hurricane Helene documentation effort.