For several years, NPR's "Weekend Edition" ran what it called the Three-Minute Fiction contest. During one round, novelist Ann Patchett served as judge. She issued a prompt: write a story that can be read aloud in three minutes and uses the words "button," "fly," "plant," and "trick." My story, "When Big Wally Lost Two Heads," was one of those chosen by Patchett to discuss on air and post on the NPR website.

In 2008, I spent one night in an ICU room with my intubated father. Years later, I took the searing memories of that endless, uncomfortable night and handed them off to a fictional character, a woman who's just been called to the hospital by her ex-husband's employer after he collapsed and was taken away by ambulance. Why in the world, she wonders, is she still his emergency contact? American Short Fiction chose "Lobsters" as its February 2020 website offering.

One year, Johns Hopkins Magazine asked me to write a short piece for the magazine's last page, where they traditionally published something by an alum. I chose to write about one of the best writers I ever knew personally, a freshman to my junior in my first real college writing class. His work leapt out for its energy and charm. It couldn't quite be contained. It was--he was--a force. He died when he was far too young, not long after his first novel was published.

"In the Bed," a creative nonfiction piece, appeared in Post Road, issue 30, spring/summer 2016. An earlier version of the piece received Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s March 2014 “Family Matters” competition.

My poem "Curve" was awarded Third Place in the 2011 Maryland Writers’ Association Short Works--Poetry Contest.

In November 2016, Defenestration published my "fake nonfiction"/humor piece, "An Open Letter to Charlotte A. Cavatica," which imagines the complicated feelings that a vulnerable young spider might have about Charlotte from E.B. White's CHARLOTTE'S WEB.