Her first book of poems, Before I Came Home Naked, won the 2007 Spire Press annual contest and was published in October 2010. (It was reissued by Ankylosaurus Press in 2012.) Her work has been selected as a finalist for several contests, including the Poetry Southeast prize and the Wisconsin People & Ideas Poetry Contest, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Gerald Stern chose her as the winner of The Dirty Napkin’s Poetry Prize, and she has been awarded a fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center.

Other poetry and nonfiction has appeared (or will soon) in magazines and journals including Anti-, Barn Owl Review, Black Warrior Review, Blue Earth Review, Brevity, Broadsided Press, Camroc Press Review, Cream City Review, The Dirty Napkin, Eclipse, Flyaway, Folio, Gargoyle, Gastronomica, Gulf Coast, H-ngm-n, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart, The Ledge, Linebreak, Mid-American Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Nervous Breakdown, The Normal School, Paper Darts, Passages North, Puerto del Sol, Red Rock Review, Rhino, River Styx, Sou’wester, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Wake: Great Lakes Thought and Culture, Water-Stone Review, and Willow Springs. Her work also appears in the anthologies The Best Creative Nonfiction Volume Three, American Creative Writers on Class, Writing That Risks, and 99 Poems for the 99 Percent, and has been featured on Verse Daily.

She has served as the managing editor of the Blue Earth Review, worked as a healthcare marketing copywriter in Madison, Wisconsin, and taught as a visiting assistant professor of writing at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she also co-founded the Cherry Bomb reading series. She currently teaches writing and technical communication at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Georgia, and yes, she has heard the Allman Brothers song. But she likes the Blind Willie McTell original better.