Hello there!
I’m a writer. In my quest to be able to say that, I held many jobs, lived other lives. I sold cemetery plots in Houston, Texas (not very well); I packed parts in a machine shop; and I was a park ranger in South Carolina, Georgia, and Oregon, where I dressed up as J.R. Beaver on Friday afternoons, inadvertently scaring small children. I did my graduate work in creative writing at the University of Houston, and I began my teaching work there. After that, I taught at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities as the Edelstein-Keller Discovery Fellow, and at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill as the Kenan Visiting Writer. Now I teach at Furman University, in Greenville, South Carolina, where I serve as the Bennette E. Geer Professor of English. I love sentences, trees, and getting new dirt under my sneakers.