She was raised in Albany, New York.She graduated from the State University of New York at Albany, and from Boston University, with an MA.She worked as a reporter for United Press International.She held a fellowship at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and taught at Tufts University. She teaches at Emerson College.

Her fiction has been published in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Glimmer Train, AGNI, Five Points.

She wrote the libretto for composer Ellen Bender’s opera of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun,and served as literary co-translator of “A Crowning Experience” by Kostiantyn Moskalets in From Three Worlds: New Writing From the Ukraine.She is on the Board of Directors of PEN-New England.

She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts with her husband, Philip Holland.

• Please Come Back To Me, short stories, University of Georgia Press, October 2010

Anthologies

• The Best American Short Stories
• The O. Henry Prize Stories

Ploughshares

• "Down in the Valley", Ploughshares, Fall 1992
• "Dear Nicole ", Ploughshares, Fall 1995
• "Shirley Wants Her Nickel Back", Ploughshares, Fall 2004