Awards

             

• Finalist New Letters Alexander Patterson Cappon Prize for Fiction, 2015
• Honorable mention, 2012 New Millennium Fiction Contest
• Fellowship:  2011 Summer Literary Seminars
• 2010 New Letters Fiction Prize--- (finalist for four short stories)
• Most Notable Essays of the Year” Best American Essays 2009 Editor:  Mary Oliver
• 2008 Sarabande books—Mary McCarthy Fiction Prize---finalist for novel Hitler’s Vegetarian Cook
• 2007 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards—finalist for novel- in-progress:  The Thirty-one Rules of Love
• First place:  2007 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize 
• Listing:  Contemporary Authors, 2005
• Invitation:  The MacDowell Colony, April, 2005
• Residency: The MacDowell Colony (five weeks) March 2002 
• Dewitt Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellow, 2001-2002 
• First Place:  Fiction Prize 1999 The Indiana Review 
• “Most Notable Essays of the Year” Best American Essays 1992, 1994, 1995 and 1997 
• Teaching Fellowship: Wesleyan Writers’ Conference June 2001 
• Residencies at the Millay Colony and Vermont Studio Center 
• State University of New York English department Award For Excellence, 1987

                                                      Anthologies

Fiction:  Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories “Jasmine Washing the Hair of Pearsa” (First prize) Del Sol Press, autumn 2007 

Essay:  “Riders on the Earth” included in Writing the Future:  Progress and Evolution/Rothenberg & Pryor, editors The M.I.T. Press, 2004 

Essay: “Simply to Thee I Cling” included in Resurrecting Grace  Marilyn Sewell, editor Beacon Press, August 2001



                                                           Essays

"The Whiskey on Her Breath," The Sun,  September, 2008