Profile

I teach writing to at-risk students of color at the University of Oregon, where I was recently awarded a Faculty Excellence Award from the Center for Multicultural Academic Success for my work in equity and diversity. I also have a B.A. in English with Creative Writing from Stanford, where I was a Presidential Scholar. My prose has appeared in The Oxford-American, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Salon, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Triquarterly, and Copper Nickel, among many others, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writer's Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission.
 From 2002-04, I taught fourth grade in the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America. My memoir forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi concerns that experience.