My first novel, The Testament of Yves Gundron (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Month, and received the Bard Fiction Prize. Brookland (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006) was also named a New York Times Notable Book, one of the twenty-five best 2006 works of fiction and poetry by the Los Angeles Times, and a 2007 selection of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, the oldest book club in the country. My most recent novel, The Book of Esther, was published in 2016 by Tim Duggan Books, and came out in paperback in 2017 with an incredible new cover by artist Tran Nguyen. An audiobook is in the works. My fiction, criticism, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Story magazine, Guernica, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Book Review, the Jewish Daily Forward’s Sisterhood blog, the New York Observer, Poetry magazine, Tablet.com, Kveller.com, and the Threepenny Review. I have received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.

I graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard/Radcliffe, and later earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. For five years, I served as Lecturer in English at Yale, where I taught fiction writing to diverse and talented undergraduates, and I also recently served for two years as the Elizabeth Drew Professor at Smith College. After a few years teaching the wonderful grads and undergrads at NYU’s Creative Writing Program, I have landed at Oberlin College, where I serve as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing.

At present I’ve shut down most of my social media accounts in favor of more real-world interactions with friends and family. If I change my mind, I’ll bring them back; and in the meanwhile, am faithfully maintaining a record of the #coxcats (TNR feral cats who live outside Oberlin College’s administration building) and my own two Siamese rescues on Instagram. Also I cut my hair since this photo was taken.