She received her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers in 1990. Currently, she lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Terlingua, Texas, and is completing a novel on the Orphan Trains. She has developed public outreach programs for the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America, Inc., and for ArtsReach, a Native American literacy project in southern Arizona. She is the author of three books, a collection of short stories entitled Small Spaces between Emergencies (Mercury House, 1992) one of the Notable Books of 1993 chosen by the American Library Association, a novel, Synonym for Love (Mercury House, 1995) and her newest, The Middle of Elsewhere. She has received several national awards as well as state arts council awards and was the winner of the Katherine Ann Porter Prize for Fiction in 2004.