Anything I write comes up from roots–in north central Louisiana where my father and I grew up, in the Acadiana prairie where my mother grew up, in Los Angeles where I lived for many years, in Paris where I live very part-time. In whatever way the words grow and bloom, take on a life of their own as they comment on life and the living world, they do so always rooted in the strength and pain of their specific ground.

I am seeking an agent to represent my novel Spitting on Hegel. The excerpt “Satisfaction” was recognized in 2018 with an honorable mention in SRAC’s Critical Mass competition. In 2019, critic and author David Ulin named the excerpt “Pacific” Best in Show: Literary.

My poems have appeared in such publications as Comstock Review, Wisconsin Review, The Bastille, New Millennium Writings, Artemis Journal, and anthologies including Maple Leaf Rag V, Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, and The Absence of Something Specified (on the theme of drought). Finishing Line Press published a chapbook of my poems, Just Following the River.

I edited and annotated an 1850s journal kept by an Irish governess in Rapides Parish, significant in the larger scheme of things because the parish courthouse burned in 1864 and records of any kind are scarce; significant to me because I am a historian by training, so the sleuthing all over the state to identify the many characters (including public figures, among them two governors) mentioned in the journal was a treasure hunt that consumed gas and years of my life. Red River X-Press in Rapides Parish published A Glorious Day: The Journal of a Central Louisiana Governess, 1853-1854.

Similarities and differences in the antebellum lives of planters in the two neighboring parishes led me to present a paper at the Louisiana Studies Conference at Northwestern State University, “Confluence and Divergence: Nineteenth Century Plantation Lifestyles Along Red River” (later published in Louisiana Folklife Journal).

I am beginning my next novel, tentatively entitled The Rift.