Summer of the Cicadas (Red Hen Press Quill Prose Award Winner)

“This bleak, slim novel packs a great deal of insight into depression, desire, and substance abuse from the perspective of a gay woman struggling to move forward in her life (“I still want to die sometimes, but I’m better at pretending”), and the merciless cicadas make for a moving metaphor of the wreckage Jessica must face and overcome. Catherine’s frightening vision makes for a worthy exercise in small-town horror.” – Publisher’s Weekly

Blindsided (Clay Reynolds Novella Contest Winner)

Final judge Clay Reynolds, Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, said of the story:

“What puts it on top of the stack ultimately, is that it is so well-crafted, that the characters are so well-wrought and well-rounded; the setting is three-dimensional and vivid, and the surrounding ambience of the whole thing suggests a holistic writing experience that brings the characters off the page, rounds them out, and forces us to care about them, even though they are so severely flawed that they seem at times to be too real, too pitiful, too self-absorbed to be tolerable. Yet somehow, they transcend those flaws with their own sense of humanity, their emotional depth, and their sense of struggle against nearly overwhelming forces. A sensual piece, it brings to the fore the contrast between lust and love, strength and dominance, vulnerability and weakness.”