She has served on the 1998 fiction fellowship panel of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and on the editorial staff of the Santa Barbara Review and Central Coast Magazine. She teaches workshops at the Santa Barbara, La Jolla, and Central Coast Writers Conferences.

She is founder and president of the Pay It Forward Foundation. As a professional public speaker she has addressed the National Conference on Education, twice spoken at Cornell University, met with Americorps members at the White House, and shared a dais with Bill Clinton.

She lives in Cambria, California.

Her work has appeared in The Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sun, Ploughshares, and Glimmer Train.

The movie Pay It Forward(Warner Brothers) was released in 2000, and starred Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment. The book has been translated into twenty languages for publication in more than thirty countries, and was chosen among the Best Books for Young Adults 2001 by the American Library Association. The paperback was released in October 2000 by Pocket Books and quickly became a national bestseller.

The April 20th, 2005 edition of Variety announced that Nicolas Cage has signed on to play Hayden Reese in the film adaptation of Electric God.

Two of her stories have been honored in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. She received second place in the 1998 Bellingham Review Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. Nearly a dozen of her stories have been nominated for Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Award, and The Pushcart Prize.

• Electric God (Simon & Schuster 2000) reprint 2002, ISBN 9780743437561
• Love in the Present Tense (Doubleday/Flying Dolphin Press Summer 2006)
• (reprint Random House, Inc., 2009 ISBN 9780307279385)

Anthologies

• Best American Short Stories