I am a fiction writer and legal reporter living in Omaha, NE. My short stories have appeared in Best New American Voices, Boulevard (as the winner of their Short Fiction Prize for Emerging Writers), The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, Confrontation, Flatmancrooked, Superstition Review, fugue, gsu review, MARY, Fogged Clarity, and Johnny America. My book reviews have been featured in Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review Online, Pleiades, and on The Millions. I’ve been awarded scholarships from the Wesleyan Writers Conference, the Key West Literary Seminar (twice), the Port Townsend Writers Conference, and earned an MA in Creative Writing as a fellow at Creighton University. I served a residency at the Kimmel Harding Center for the Arts in the spring of 2010,  received Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology the same year.

Currently I have an unpublished short story collection (Bad Faith, Semi-Finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award) and a novel (The Uninitiated)–and I am looking for representation.

Here’s a bit about The Uninitiated:

After fleeing his family homestead to escape retribution for a violent act he’s committed, twenty year-old Jacob Bressler finds himself amongst a group of political and ethnic exiles in World War I Omaha. Adrift in an era of unprecedented violence and nationalism, Jacob is pulled in different directions by those who seek to define him. His overbearing and troublesome pastor father, Pfarrer Bressler; Evie Chambers, a femme fatale looking to escape her cheerless life as a kept woman; and the real-life boss of Omaha machine politics, Tom Dennison, a desperate power-broker who uses violence to control the will of ethnic voters. As Dennison’s will to power careens out of control during a race riot and lynching, the true events of the Omaha Race Riot of 1919, Jacob finds himself caught up in a singular historical moment and one of Omaha’s most tragic episodes.

The Uninitiated reveals the vicious underside of human nature, the passions of a cursed family, and how tragic events can restore justice to the world in unlikely ways. This is a novel shaped by global forces, xenophobia, racism, and brutal politics. But in more personal ways, the character of Jacob Bressler reminds us what it’s like trying to live down a bad reputation. The Uninitiated is about wearing out your welcome at home, and a young man who’s forced to place his trust in the power of second chances.

Curriculum Vitae