Cattle Upon a Thousand Hills,
Appalachian Review (2021).
I was two-and-a-half years-old when I stood at the living room window with my very pregnant mother, watching our barn burn down. “I think you kind of enjoyed it,” she told me later. “The neighbors came and threw snowballs at the flames.”
No firefighters ventured out to save the barn or the animals lodged therein—ten cows, a horse, and a cat…
Ward Eleven, Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art (2021).
It is now a broom closet, this place where I stand, so cramped that I press my arms tightly to my chest to avoid soiling my new silk blouse on the grimy walls. Entering the closet a few seconds ago, I stumbled on the vacuum cleaner, bruising my ankle, and now my feet squeeze themselves into a small spot. . .
My Father and the Hair Grafter, Tampa Review (2014).
When my father’s life was on the skids—after he quit his job, and my mother filed for divorce, and he got arrested for shoplifting steaks in Jordano’s Grocery Store—he moved to a shack on El Sueño Road, out past the Earl Warren Show Grounds. A few weeks later, he volunteered for a series of experimental transplants, in pursuit of a head of hair. . .
Published Work
“So Young and So Untender”: Remorseless Children and the Expectations of the Law, Columbia Law Review (2002).
A nine-year-old speaks with apparent callousness as he walks by the body of the girl he has killed. A fourteen-year-old jokes about "body parts in her pocket" after bashing in her mother's head with a candlestick holder. . .
Photo Copyright of Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Courtesy of Georgia State University Library.
A Perfect Start, North Dakota Quarterly (2004).
Despite good looks, brilliance, and abundant charm, a man cannot find his place in the world. Convinced that such a place exists, he tries one job after another, taking his young family on a Childe Harold's Pilgrimage through state after state until they arrive at the final cliffs and can go no farther. . .
What Not to Do When Your Roommate is Murdered in Italy: Amanda Knox, Her “Strange” Behavior, and the Italian Legal System, Harvard Journal of Law and Gender (2017).
When I was twenty years old, during a brief sojourn in a poor, deathly hot Venezuelan border town called San Antonio del Táchira, I accepted a free ride from a stranger and nearly got myself raped. Why, the reader may wonder, did I take such a chance? . . .
So Have I Been a Good Stepmother?, The Gettysburg Review (2006).
After crossing over the Duwamish Waterway, the number 137 bus climbed up Boeing Hill. The bus moved with agonizing slowness, and I worried it would lose its grip on the road and roll, like the rock of Sisyphus, backwards to the bottom. . .
Return to Eden, Passages North (2002).
In my fortieth year of life, I awakened early one morning out of a dream. In this dream, I was back in Minnesota gliding on the ice. When I woke up, a great sadness came over me, as I remembered Minnesota and all I had left behind. I felt so strongly that the move was a break, a change that could never be undone. And I thought to myself: I have never even been back. . .
Beauty in the Dark of Night: The Pleasures of Form in Criminal Law, Emory Law Journal (2010).
In a noisy Italian restaurant, over low bowls of steaming eggplant parmigiana, an old friend startled me one evening by saying, "I just don't know how you can work in that field." By "that field," I realized my friend meant criminal law, though I still don't understand why she condemned it so harshly. . .