After attending the Haystack Writing Workshop with Ursula K. Le Guin, I took my PhD from UC Berkeley in 1990; my current projects include a critical examination of literary “success” in America, a sequence of novels, including STILL ICE which won a UF Rothman Summer Grant, the first chapter of which was published online at EMBARK: A LITERARY JOURNAL FOR NOVELISTS. I am the author of: THE WARPAINT TRILOGY (2012-14) from which I have recently given several readings, and an academic talk about combining creative and academic careers; also SF novel OTHER NATURE (TOR/FORGE, 1995); THE-BOY-WHO-WAS-THROWN-AWAY and SNOW-EYES (Atheneum/DAW 1985/87); short stories in New Letters, Asimov’s, and SF&F. I have held fiction residencies at the Writer’s Colony, the VCCA, Noepe Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Norcroft, Provincetown and Dorland. I was an NEH Scholar at UCLA, also the author of Conceived By Liberty (Cornell 1995) which was short-listed for the MLA first book prize, and Household Words (Minnesota, 2006).
Currently, I am an SF/F reviewer for Kirkus and I’m on the Advisory Board for Feminist Studies; my essays appear in American Literature, Genders, Genre and Differences; I am an affiliate at the CGSWSR, AAS, CES and have served the Harn Museum as a fiction/poetry judge for their annual student contest. Most frequently I teach 19thC American Literature, courses on Melville, James, Wharton and Plath or Critical Theory, particularly queer and feminist theory.