In first grade, I opted out of recess, preferring to sit inside and write my “novel.” In fifth grade, I began a writing collaboration with my best friend (okay, only friend), which consisted primarily of historical fiction epics with ample Oregon Trail content — hey, it was the early ‘90s. We also edited each other’s stories, passing marked-up manuscripts behind our teacher’s back. This is why I’m not particularly great at math, but feel like I came out of the womb with a thesaurus and an unwavering love for the em dash.

I’m an essayist and journalist who especially loves to explore the seams between lyric memoir and reporting. I also dabble in fiction. As a journalist, I often write at the intersection of social justice and rural issues. In my creative writing, I’m immensely inspired by place and questions of memory, longing, and home. My writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Longreads, Guernica, The New York Review of Books, High Country News, The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and many other digital and print outlets, including the 2016 and 2017 Best of Food Writing anthologies. I’m a two-time Pushcart nominee and was a 2019 finalist for the James Beard Award for Investigative Reporting, among myriad other awards and honors. Most recently, I became the grateful recipient of the Ellen Meloy Fund’s 2024 Desert Writers Award.

In addition to writing and editing, I have a background in food systems, arid lands agriculture, and community organizing. For nearly a decade, I’ve worked with award-winning photographer Audra Mulkern of The Female Farmer Project. Our full-length documentary film, Women’s Work: The Untold Story of America’s Female Farmers, premiers in May 2024.

In 2021, after sixteen formative years in the Sonoran Desert, I moved back to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina. I live in the woods, out past where the cell signal drops, and I like it that way. I’m a solo mom, a nap connoisseur, and I refuse to believe that I own too many books. I love desert monsoon season and Appalachian rhododendron tunnels. During the pandemic, I got into really bad reality TV, and I’m sorry/not sorry.

And oh hey, I’m also writing a book! My debut memoir-in-essays is forthcoming from Grand Central, an imprint of Hachette, in 2025.