I was born in Washington, D.C., moved with my family to Florida at age five, and grew up on the Atlantic coast, close to the beach. The ocean, long walks on the sand, and eventually, skipping school to drive central Florida’s back roads, fed my imagination and the desire to lead a creative life. My obsessions were music, reading and writing.

At first, music won out. I studied clarinet performance, played in orchestras and chamber groups, and collaborated with composers on new, experimental works. Then came opportunities to write about music, which led to years of full-time arts journalism, magazine work, editing, book writing, and teaching. I was the first executive director of the Writers League of Texas.

More recently, I’ve been a professor of music history and English at the University of Wyoming, where I was founding director of the MFA Creative Writing Program. Following that, I was a professor of creative writing at the the University of North Texas, and editor of American Literary Review. I have worked as a librettist as well, having written nine commissioned musical texts, from songs to operas.

In 2014, with the support of the Bartlett Foundation, I left my teaching post in Texas to research and write The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Author of “The Yearling.” Previous fellowships and residencies have come from the Rockefeller Foundation, Cornell University, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the National Park Service, the Jentel Foundation, the Hambidge Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and others. I live outside Asheville, NC with my husband Ken Gerow, a statistician, and our brilliant Australian Shepherd, Cora.