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, just as a genetic condition began cramping my fingers, opportunities to write about music arose, leading to a new career in arts journalism, essay and 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: 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, and have collaborated (as musician and lyricist) with visual artists and dancers in multi-media works.

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, 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 Performance), University of Houston (Creative Writing). Post-doctoral fellowship: Cornell University (Music and Writing).

Right now, I'm working on The Devil’s Dream, an opera with composer Mara Gibson (2027 premiere). Recent contributions to the arts include serving as a judge for PEN America’s Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography (2024). In 2025, I co-led the oral history component of Come Hell or High Water, a community memory project in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Helene in western North Carolina. https://helenehistory.omeka.net/ I’m very proud of the work we did.

I live in Fairview, NC with my husband Ken Gerow, a statistician, and our brilliant Australian Shepherd, Cora.