Fiction

Writing fiction remains my greatest challenge--and my greatest passion. I have published short stories in print and online in literary journals such as Partisan Review, Fiction, Willows Wept Review, and StoryQuarterly, My short story "Livia" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can read an excerpt here. "From Blue Pine" is rooted in the mountains of the state I grew up in, Colorado.  

 

My first novel, Choke Creek, is based on the Sand Creek Massacre, which also took place in Colorado.














My novel Wolf Constellation covers four generations and one hundred years in a Jewish family. At the center of the novel is Dr. Gus Thaler of the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic who is treating Anna Glanz, a 15-year-old girl who has stopped speaking in the wake of her brother's death. Thaler's search to cure Anna takes him back to a nineteenth-century rabbi-healer who once exorcised a spirit from Anna's grandmother. Ultimately, fifty years later, as Anna lays dying, her daughter finally uncovers the truth her mother still can't bring herself to say.
 


The Hanging of Ruben Ashford tells the story of the search for social justice during the time of a pandemic. It's set in Baltimore in 1918, and follows Josie Berenson, a psychology researcher at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, who is tasked with helping defend a young Black man who has been accused of murdering a white woman. Meanwhile her partner, Dr. Nell Winters, confronts an influenza epidemic that is rapidly killing thousands. The path forward, Josie and Nell learn, is fraught with difficulty, but not without hope.

Read a review of The Hanging of Ruben Ashford in Hopkins Medicine here.