A former Fulbright Scholar, she has received the Mary Grant Charles Award for fiction, the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Tufts University Africana Prize for Creativity. She is the recipient of a 2008 Pushcart Prize, the 2006 Boston Review Fiction Prize, and was the Parks Fellow/Writer-in-Residence at Rice University. Her short story “The Saving Work” was chosen by Margot Livesey for the 2007 Kore Press Short Fiction Award. And here is the new bio line: Her first book, How to Escape from a Leper Colony is forthcoming from Graywolf Press.