I was born in Alpine, Texas, which means the desert is in my blood whether I want it there or not.

I write from West Texas, where I was raised and where I still live. Before I began building a life around the page, I spent twenty-four years as an executive chef. Both kinds of work taught me to pay attention: to pressure, structure, what people reveal, and what they try not to.

My work moves between fiction, memoir, cultural criticism, and archival research because the questions underneath it have never divided cleanly by genre.

The Marfa Bureau stays close to the desert ground it is named for. The Long Night holds the personal essays—the experiences we understand differently after dark, when people stop performing. The Forbidden Archive works from the record: cases, documents, institutions, and the women those institutions were meant to protect.

Different rooms. The same attention carried into each of them.