She was born in Colorado. When she was a child, she was affected by alopecia, and by the age of 11, she had lost all of her hair.[3]
She graduated from Yale University in 2004,[4] and received her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from Brooklyn College (CUNY) in 2007.[5] She moved to Brooklyn with her husband, the artist Adam Douglas Thompson, when she began Brooklyn's MFA and is now an associate professor of creative writing in the English Department of Brooklyn Collegehttps://www.brooklyn.edu/academics/programs/creative-writing-mfa/.
Her debut was the story collection And Yet They Were Happy.[6] It was named a notable collection by The Story Prize.[7] In 2013, she wrote a children's adventure novel.[8] She followed with her first adult novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat.[9]
And Yet They Were Happy (2011),[6] winner of The Story Prize, finalist in the Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize Contest (2009), published by Leapfrog Press
Some Possible Solutions (2016)[13] received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award.[11]