Body piercing Headhunters Memoirs Classic novels My own novels
Writer, professor, lover of culture, North Carolina and New York.
Winner of the American Book Award — Crossing Ocean Parkway
A New York Times Notable Paperback — Gone Primitive
“A fireworks of a book. Read and praise it.”
Catherine R. Stimpson · Gone Primitive
“Brave, enlightening, compassionate, and beautifully written.”
Joyce Carol Oates · Crossing Ocean Parkway
“Intends to provoke thought, not to tell you what you already know — and for that reason alone it’s extraordinary.”
Walter Kendrick, The New York Times · Primitive Passions
“A beautifully written meditation on the horrifying and yet strangely narcotic spectacle of mass death.”
Stanley Fish · The War Complex
“A story of operatic proportions.”
Gene Scheer · The Novelist’s Wife
“Movingly demonstrates how to hang on and how to let go of the people and things we love.”
Sean Metzger · Crossing Back
I split my time between Durham, North Carolina, and New York. I also write novels that I want to be smart, warm, and readable.
My critical writing mixes the scholarly and the personal, and deals especially with three subjects: primitivism; beginnings and endings; and growing up female and ethnic in New York City.
