Photo credit: Ellen Wertheim
I am a writer and teacher, very much a product of the Midwest but also shaped by years of living in Iowa, France, Vermont and New York City. And while my writing evolved into creative nonfiction out of the literary and cultural criticism in which I was trained as an academic, its central concerns have remained steady: the emotional texture of change and of family, and writing as a source of resilience.
My monograph on the politics of letter writing in the turn-of-the-century U.S. (Authority and Alliance in the Letters of Henry Adams, 1992) and my memoir about growing up in post-World War II suburbia (Hunger Artist, 2007) both explore the relationship between language and community in times of transition and loss. My most recent book, Every Last Breath: A Memoir of Two Illnesses (2020) places into dialogue with one another my mother’s chronic lung disease and my own rare blood disorder, following over ten years the transformations that illness—and, equally, writing about illness—brought to both our lives.
My essays have appeared in New England Review, Fourth Genre, BOMB, Florida Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Iowa Review, Southwest Review, and The Nation, as well as many other publications, and have been cited in Best American Essays and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2026 Finishing Line Press will be bringing out my prose chapbook, In the Photic Zone, which opens up the emotional life that goes on beneath the visible surfaces of family, of the body, and of nature and history.
I received my B.A. from the University of Illinois, Urbana, and my M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, all in American Civilization. I am grateful to have had wonderful students at the University of Iowa, the University of Angers, Middlebury College, and Yeshiva University, who have continually challenged and sharpened my work as a writer—especially my understanding of autobiographical forms and of the craft of nonfiction writing.
Since retiring from full-time teaching, I have lived in Evanston, Illinois, and I’ve taught courses on writing about the body in the medical humanities program at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine and the medical colloquia program at the University of Illinois-Chicago College of Medicine.