Just finished packing for Portland, where I’m moderating a panel called Go Your Own Way at AWP. Jennifer Baker, Laura C. Brown, Charlie J. Eskew, Amanda Miska, and I will be discussing the different ways people can become writers or have literary careers or make connections in the industry, etc. It’s a panel I would…

The best thing about being a public school librarian at a Title I school in Athens, GA is knowing that each of my students K-5 is going to receive 12 free books to help prevent summer slide, courtesy of local organization Books for Keeps. On Monday and Tuesday I will help coordinate our book distribution,…

This summer UGA professor Melisa Cahnmann- Taylor invited me to read for her lit series Seat in The Shade. I opened for Georgia via Louisiana rock star poet Jericho Brown. Love seeing him read and especially love how in the discussion part Jericho discussed the influence of the Black church on his performance and writing….

My friends Chrissy Stroop and Deepak Singh convinced me to start a podcast. It’s called Global Crossroads: Stories about Migration, Religion, and Being Human. You can listen to our first episode here. Tomorrow we will interview feminist hero and Arab and Muslim issues expert, Mona Eltahawy, about her new book, The Seven Necessary Sins for…

A few years back Chrissy Stroop and Lauren O’Neal put out a call to writers to submit essays about their stories of leaving the church. Two amazing things happened. 1. My essay, Fundamentalist, made the cut along with a bunch of incredible essays which were collected in an anthology called Empty the Pews: Stories of…

Sometime after September 11th, I went back to the Delta to visit my grandfather Waters Hicks. My son had been born in August of that year and I wanted my grandfather to meet him. Also, I realize now, that even though I have effectively exiled myself from the Delta, I tend to go back to…

Me, my husband, Chris, and a collective of incredible Athenians known as Shield Athens spent the first 6 weeks of the pandemic making face shields for medical workers. We ended up distributing around 2500, free of charge. The incredible Jessica Handler, author of Invisible Sisters and the Magnetic Girl, profiled us in the AJC. Love…

Monday night I watched the Paris Hilton documentary, This Is Paris, which in part deals with Hilton’s time at the troubled teen facility Provo Canyon. I found the documentary disturbing, which surprised me mainly because I have spent so long writing about and researching these programs, a large part of Unreformed traces the history of…

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