I’m fascinated by the stories we tell—big cultural stories and small personal stories and family stories and regional stories and everything in between. I think our memories shape our identities, and I think our stories shape our memories. So writing and reading literature for me is a way to find out more about ourselves and the cultural context we live in. As a scholar, a writer, a teacher, and a person in the world, I’m trying to figure out who I am, who we are, and what that means. Our texts are our contexts.

I came to Warren Wilson after getting my Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina and teaching for nearly 20 years at several institutions, the longest being a decade in North Dakota. Warren Wilson feels like coming home.