<bio>
My travel writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Miami Herald, South Florida
Sun-Sentinel, Baltimore Sun and other newspapers, and I've written for magazines including Washingtonian, The Nature Conservancy Magazine, Maryland Life,
and Hemispheres. My travel essays have also been featured in
The Best American Travel Writing 2006 and Travelers’ Tales Best Travel Writing 2005, and my work was included in The Best American Travel Writing 2008's listing of "Notable Travel Writing in 2007." My
fiction and essays have been published in journals including The Georgia Review, Antioch Review, Glimmer
Train, and Rosebud, and in The Silver Rose Anthology.
I've also written for websites including the Rails-to-Trails
Conservancy site, rails-to-trails.org, and Visit Baltimore's site,
baltimore.org.
I have won a number of awards for my work; most recently, I won the 2011 Travel Classics International travel writing contest. I also received a 2004 Book Passage Travel Essay Contest prize, a 2004
Maryland State Arts Council grant, and a Silver Rose Award from the ART
Foundation in 2002. In summer 2006 I was writer-in-residence at KHN
Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska. In summer 2008 I had a
position as a volunteer in the Florida state park system, which let me
continue research in the Florida panhandle, the setting for the
historical novel I am currently working on.
I have an MFA in
fiction from George Mason University,
and am a senior lecturer in creative writing at University of Maryland
Baltimore County (UMBC), where I am director of the English Department's
Writing and Rhetoric Division.
Each week my hour-long program "Prose and Poetry" is broadcast via the Radio Reading Network, which serves blind and visually impaired listeners in the mid-Atlantic region. Reading, it turns out, can be as powerful, cathartic, and creative an act as writing.