She holds an MFA in fiction from UC Irvine and a PhD in American literature from UC Berkeley. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, and Santa Monica Review, among others, and her fiction has been recognized by Best American Short Stories and anthologized in Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian American Writers. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection between literature and electoral politics in the early United States. She is currently completing a novel, Half-Terrorist.