My debut novel, The Toss of a Lemon, was published in eight countries, a bestseller in three, and a finalist for the Commonwealth (Regional) First Book Prize, the Amazon.ca First Novel Prize and the Pen Center USA Fiction Prize. The second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, was published in Canada, the USA, India and Australia. In Canada, it was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a national bestseller.

My short fiction has been published in such venues as Granta Online and The Boston Review. I’ve also writtenpersonal essays, reviews and cultural journalism, as well as several produced plays. For my writing, I have gratefully accepted grants from the US National Endowment for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts and many others, as well as fellowships at artists’ residencies such as Sacatar Brazil and the MacDowell Colony.

My most recent publication is a translation of the novel São Bernardo, by the late, lauded Brazilian novelist Graciliano Ramos, by the New York Review Books. I have translated other, shorter writings from Portuguese, some of which are available elsewhere on this site.

An Associate Professor in fiction-writing and literature in the Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville, I’m happy to have served on juries for literary awards in Canada and the US, including the Governor General’s Award in fiction, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Neustadt Prize, and others. I’ve additionally been guest faculty in fiction for the Banff Center, the Vermont Studio Center, Kundiman, Breadloaf Sicily, and elsewhere. Yes, it’s all just as fun as it sounds.

I was honored to be selected for the 2017 Porter Prize, awarded to an Arkansas writer in recognition of a body of work.

Canadian by birth and temperament, I now live on a hilltop in Arkansas with my husband (the poet and translator Geoffrey Brock), children, our parents and an ever-shifting array of animals.