I was born and grew up in various cities throughout Texas.
On a filmmaking scholarship, I left for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lived there for six years. At SAIC, my interests moved to creative writing and performance art, which I studied with David Sedaris, James McManus, and Lin Hixson. Upon graduating, I continued creative work in those fields while finding employment as an advertising copywriter.
For three years I lived in Portland, OR, where I wrote the bulk of my first novel and edited my first nonfiction collection. More advertising jobs.
Employment drew me north to Seattle, where I lived for nine years. There I wrote my second novel and much of my short-story collection. More advertising jobs, with detours into a dot-com startup and an arts administration gig. Eventually, I gave up advertising and enrolled in graduate school, earning a Master of Communication in Digital Media from the University of Washington, working with David Domke, Lance Bennett, Crispin Thurlow, and David Silver. My thesis was "“Pundits in Muckraker’s Clothing: Political Blogs and the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election,” parts of which were published in two book chapters.
Grad school took me to Los Angeles, where I lived for five years, earning a PhD in Communication from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. At USC I worked with many people, including Sarah Banet-Weiser, Larry Gross, Herman Gray, Anne Balsamo, Josh Kun, Doug Thomas, and Nina Eliasoph. My dissertation was “Killer Apps and Sick Users: Technology, Disease, and Differential Analysis.”
Currently I live in Greenville, South Carolina and work at Clemson University. I serve as Director of Graduate Studies for our MA in Communicaiton, Technology and Society and as Co-chair for the LGBTQ Studies Interest Group of the International Communication Association.
