I’m a British-American writer and scholar born in Texas and now based in Egypt. I’m often between places, and I travel in my writing, too.
I currently teach Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. This year I’m also delighted to be a Robert B. Silvers Work-in-Progress Grantee.
I was raised in France and the United Kingdom, and I worked in publishing in New York before returning to Cambridge for my PhD in American Literature; I passed my viva with no corrections in 2024. My doctoral thesis was a critical biography of the American short story writer Lucia Berlin, funded by a Full Studentship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I’m under contract with Farrar, Straus & Giroux to adapt this into into a trade book at the intersection of biography and travel writing, called Looking for Lucia: A Biography in Motion — more news on this soon. In the meantime, you can find my Granta and Paris Review essays about Berlin under Non-Fiction, above, as well as my recent academic articles on Berlin, autofiction and biographical writing. I was awarded the 2023 Chip Bishop Fellowship by the Biographers International Organisation.
I’m also writing a novel, a formally experimental literary thriller called Puck. It’s is in a similar vein to my short stories, which have been published in Ambit, American Chordata, Carve Magazine, Granta, The Idaho Review, Litro, The London Magazine, 3:AM, the Mays anthology and elsewhere; you can find them under Fiction, above. I won an Editor’s Choice Award in the 2021 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest for ‘The Kingdom of the Shades’, a queer story of love and loss in which ballet dancers and ghosts wander around Rome at night — you can read that here. In 2024, I was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Idaho Review, for ‘Georgia O’Keeffe and the Angel of Death’, a short story about Tarot cards, bad hats, and a really bad boyfriend, which you can read here.
You can also find me on Instagram, or contact me directly through the form on this page. You can sign up to my newsletter here.
I’m represented by David Godwin at David Godwin Associates.