A little about me

Some writers find their stories. Others are found by them. I belong to the second kind.

I grew up in the Mississippi where the air is thick with history, where front porches hold more secrets than confessionals, and where the stories people don't tell out loud have a way of surfacing anyway. It is the kind of place that gets into you. It never fully leaves. And honestly, I never wanted it to.

I came to writing the way most Southern storytellers do: not through a single moment of inspiration, but through a lifetime of listening. To the women in the kitchen. To the silences at the dinner table. To the things said sideways, in the space between what people mean and what they actually say. College writing courses gave me a language for what I had always felt instinctively: that the most important truths live beneath the surface, and that fiction is one of the few tools sharp enough to dig them out.

But if I am being honest about where the writing really begins, it begins in my head. I play with the people who live there. I follow them around. I sit with them in their kitchens and their silences and their unfinished grief until I understand what they need from me. That is how I fell in love with writing, every single time. Not with the words first, but with the people. They find me. They make themselves known. And eventually, they make it clear that they want their stories told.

My debut novel, Some Price to Pay, is the book that started everything: the one I had to write before I could write anything else. My current novel, The Unaccompanied Soul, takes place in Lazy Creek, Mississippi, a town that breathes, watches, and remembers. It is a book about what we bury, what survives the burying, and what it finally costs to tell the truth.

I write across genres, but always with the same conviction: that language should do more than describe. It should linger. It should trouble you a little. It should leave a mark.

I believe in the power of a quiet sentence to hold more than a loud one. I believe in readers who lean in rather than sit back. And I believe, after everything, in the grace of a story told honestly, even when honesty is the hardest thing.

My goal is to write stories that linger even after the reading is done.