A native Midwesterner, she has lived in the small-town South for more than twenty years. She teaches courses in American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has a special interest in American poetry from Whitman and Emerson to the present. She has published essays on a number of twentieth century writers including poets A. R. Ammons and Howard Nemerov and short story writers Alice Munro, William Trevor, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Grace Paley. She has also published poems.