She’s the author of the narrative nonfiction book, The New Wild West: Black Gold, Fracking, and Life in a North Dakota Boomtown (St. Martin’s Press/2017), which was the 2016 finalist for the Lukas Work-in-Progress Award from Columbia Journalism School and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. In 2017, an excerpt from the book won Proximity Magazine’s Narrative Journalism Prize. She received the Richard J. Margolis Award for social justice journalism in 2014, and she graduated from the University of California, Davis with a degree in international relations. She teaches journalism at Santa Rosa Junior College, and she’s been a writer-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Mesa Refuge, and Blue Mountain Center. She grew up in the small town of Mount Shasta, California, and now resides in Santa Rosa, California.