I am so grateful that NYT Sports Editor Jason Stallman honored my research during his Pulitzer speech to The New York Times newsroom on Monday, April 15th. It was an honor to help create the NYT article and e-book, “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, honoring “a distinguished example of feature writing giving prime consideration to quality of writing, originality and concision, using any… Read More

I’ve turned to The Stranger for arts and culture events in Seattle since I moved here eight years ago.  So it was with unseemly amounts of satisfaction that I read Paul Constant’s kind endorsement of the Cheap Beer & Prose reading I gave on March 21st with Nicole Hardy, Anca Szilágyi and Corinne Manning at Richard Hugo House. We are, ahem, “an especially exciting lineup of fresh new faces in Seattle… Read More

Beginning in April 2012, I conducted research for The New York Times’ multimedia narrative feature entitled Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.  I am proud to be a small part of the team that produced the December 2012 story, which was written by John Branch. I began researching the story by compiling multimedia narrative biographies of the people involved in the February 2012 avalanche, as well as creating  chronologies of… Read More

I am grateful that veteran reporter Bill Lucey looks me up every once in a while to see how I’m doing since the Seattle P-I closed.  After checking in with me in 2010 for The Huffington Post, Bill called me earlier this summer to chat about writing and life after newspapers.  Thanks to him for this profile on his  site newspaperalum.com!

Anca Szilagyi is one of my favorite writers.  We met at the MFA program at the University of Washington, where she counseled me on the vagaries of workshopping a novel.  On August 1st, I was honored to help her read the title story of her collection More Like Home than Home, which she is polishing as a 2012-13 Made at Hugo House fellow. Along with Corinne Manning, Anca curates The Furnace… Read More

I began teaching at the University of Washington this year, spending three quarters as an instructor of English 131, a first-year student composition class, and two quarters as an intern for English 484, an advanced prose class taught by my Master of Fine Arts creative manuscript supervisor, Author and Professor David Shields. David and UW Professor and Author Shawn Wong are advising me as I complete and revise my novel… Read More

At the Western Washington Society of Professional Journalists annual banquet on May 21st, I was honored to accept the Susan Hutchison Bosch award for perseverance and quiet courage on behalf of my good friend and journalism colleague Dorothy Parvaz, better known as D. SPJ Western Washington Chapter President Clay Holtzman and I are grinning for good reason.   D had just been freed.  A citizen of the U.S., Canada and Iran and a former… Read More

I am so grateful to Elizabeth Lowry, Director of Marketing and Communications at the University of Washington Graduate School, for highlighting my story in this student profile.

I am still finishing my first novel, Subduction, but the process of watching the characters develop independent of my will has been a revelation. The characters speak to me. No, not to me, in front of me, allowing me to record their conversations. They get mad, frustrated, if I leave them in limbo for too long; and when I return, they refuse to turn their heads at my tapping on… Read More