About
I received the 2024 Grace Paley Prize for my manuscript “Lake Song” (Mad Creek Books, September, 2025). My stories have received the 2018 Bosque Literary Journal fiction prize, the 2019 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award first place for fiction, and theghoststory.com 2020 summer fiction prize. Other writing has been published in the Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Christian Science Monitor, and Sequestrum, Zone 3, Pangyrus, Craft, and other literary magazines, and my debut collection of short stories, "Unaccustomed to Grace," was published in 2022 by Kallisto Gaia Press. Before I was a fiction writer, I wrote widely about folklore, history, and holidays. My latest non-fiction book, "Halloween Nation" (Pelican publishing) was a Bram Stoker finalist.
Featured Work
Lake Song. A novel in stories
The linked stories of Lake Song, set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region, span decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the twentieth century hurtles forward. Against a backdrop of historical events—bootlegging, Klan attacks, gold smuggling, the Albany Ketchup Murders, the 1965 Northeast blackout—a generations-long mystery unwinds.
