My first novel, published in 1988 and long out of print, is returning May 28 as an e-book and Audible Book. Neena Gathering is a novel about the day after the end of the world, but told with "Thoreauvian attention to a person’s place and moral actions in the spheres of nature, society, intellect."
My novel Blood Clay, published in 2011, won the Eric Hoffer Prize in General Fiction, and was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Prize. I also have a collection of short stories, Fidelities, and a poetry collection, Wake Wake Wake. My work has appeared in many journals including New Letters, Poetry, the North Carolina Literary Review, and the Kenyon Review, and in several anthologies. I have received an NEA creative writing fellowship as well as grants from North Carolina, West Virginia, and Kentucky, and prizes including two Elizabeth Simpson Smith awards in fiction and the Greg Grummer Prize in poetry. I graduated from West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte. A longtime newspaper reporter and editor, I now teach writing at North Carolina A&T State University and serve as poetry editor of Prime Number magazine. In my spare time I enjoy sailing, camping, walking.
