I'm from the Black Belt region of Alabama. My most recent book is Pasture Art, a collection of short stories. A novel, Children of Dust, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in the fall of 2021. I've published two earlier novels, The Cross Garden and A Broken Thing, and two previous collections, The Dry Well and Dancing by the River. My stories have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. I've also been awarded the Truman Capote Prize for short fiction. I teach in, and help direct, the Writing Our Stories project, a program for juvenile offenders created by the Alabama Writers' Forum, and I've been teaching in the low-residency MFA program at Converse College since 2010.