She graduated from Hollins College, Brown University, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She taught at State University of New York but quit academia after receiving promotion and tenure in her fifth year.

Her published work consists of two collections of poetry, four novels, and two fantasies, as well as uncollected short stories and poems.

She has published short fiction in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, including Story Quarterly, The Southern Humanities Review, The South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, Argosy, Kansas Quarterly, Fantasy Magazine, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, The Raleigh News & Observer, Logorrhea (Bantam), Blue Moon Café IV (MacAdam/Cage), Northwest Passages (Windstorm), Sci Fiction, This is How We Live (The University of North Carolina, 2000), Mars Hill Review, Salon Fantastique (Thunder's Mouth), We Think, Therefore We Are(DAW), Extraordinary Engines (Solaris), various Postcripts magazines and anthologies (UK: P. S. Publishing), The Beastly Bride (Penguin/Firebird), Firebirds Soaring (Penguin/Firebird) Ghosts by Ghastlight (HarperCollins), The New Gothic (Prime), and others.

Her poetry has appeared in The Flea, Mezzo Cammin, Canto, Books & Culture, Ploughshares, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Black Warrior Review, The Little Magazine, The Blueline Anthology (Syracuse University Press), and many other anthologies and magazines. Other online poems have appeared at The Flea, Books and Culture, The Hypertexts, qarrtsiluni, etc.

She is the winner of the Michael Shaara Award for The Wolf Pit, her third novel, as well as a two-time winner of the Theodore Hoepfner Award for the short story and the winner of the New Writers Award of Capital Magazine (New York), also for the short story. She has held fellowships from Yaddo, New York State, and elsewhere. Forthcoming stints as writer in residence: Hollins University M. A. Children's literature program, "Shared Worlds" (Spartanburg).