Prodigies Finalist for the 2025 Pangyrus Fiction Prize
"'Do you want to keep playing?' Jane asked.
Rory kept her eyes on the screen and in a soft voice said, 'No one ever asked me that'
Then she was quiet. Maybe her dad wouldn’t let her quit. This was dangerous because people did terrible things when they felt trapped. That girl whose dad threw her medal out the car window tried to kill herself when she didn’t make the national team. And how about the divers with eating disorders, anxiety, and the one who started cutting? You never knew who’d snap."
"The Cellar" - Winner of Arts & Letters 2021 Fiction Prize
“[“The Cellar” is] a taut and wonderfully written story that uses the suspense of a looming natural disaster and the claustrophobia of a basement hideout to explore as well as explode the secrets, tensions, hopes, and dreams of a Midwestern family in crisis. Through precise dramatization, “The Cellar” moves beautifully in and out of time, casting a revelatory weight on the present with each excavation of the past.”
– Novuyo Tshuma, Judge
