Winner of the 2020 GOLDEN POPPY AWARD for nonfiction from the CA Independent Booksellers Alliance!

I’m floored to learn that HOME BAKED won the 2020 Golden Poppy for nonfiction! Recent recipients include Julia Flynn Siler and Michael Pollan, so I’m in ridiculously fine company. In normal times, this would have involved a fancy lunch, a special dress, and shaky hands. But it’s 2020 so I’m chomping on Krispy Kreme delivery…

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Guernica Magazine: Baking Through a Plague

On one of her monthly brownie runs, my mom caught her first glimpse of the monster coming our way.

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New essay in River Teeth

We were early birds, bad girls, schemers, druggies. Aria and I only attended high school as freshmen; after that, we were independent study kids. While Analy High’s class of ’96 amassed memories to chronicle in yearbooks, we skulked around our small California town, smoking weed and later meth, hitchhiking, getting fucked up with grown men.…

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“Snakebit” in The Best American Essays 2017!

I’m over the moon! My essay “Snakebit,” originally published in The Threepenny Review, has been chosen for The Best American Essays 2017, edited by one of my literary heroes, Leslie Jamison. “Chasing Arrows,” published in New England Review, also received an honorable mention. This is proof positive that a new writer can still gain entrance to…

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“Snakebit” in The Threepenny Review

We meet a fat diamondback five minutes down the trail. He is stretched across the path, dozing in the shade of a juniper bush. I’m an adult, so I want to act like one, but I’m crying so hard I can’t inhale and snot is dribbling into my mouth. It takes me twenty minutes to…

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