Photo Credits: Dan Lowrie, Getty Images, & Mai Le
About
My first job was at Taco Bell in Fresno, California, and almost everything I write references Taco Bell in some way or another. My short story, “24-Hour Grocery” was published in the zine Spunk in San Francisco before the Internet exploded. A few years later I earned my MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College in Oakland, California.
I spent my twenties and early thirties in San Francisco, temping and writing and editing and marketing, and fronting a few indie-rock bands, opening for the Decemberists and The Arcade Fire in the US and underground bands in the UK and Europe, making notes for stories and novels from the tour van. In 2008 my husband and I welcomed our daughter to the world. Our son arrived in 2010. We landed in suburbia, remodeled a house, and grew tomatoes and peaches.
In the summer of 2017 I participated in the Tin House Summer’s Writer Workshop for my first novel-in-progress with Naomi Jackson. A few days after the workshop my family moved from Walnut Creek, California, to my hometown in Hawaii.
My essay, “Try Wait,” was published in the 2018 America issue of the zine We’ll Never Have Paris. I wrote The ‘Ohana Grill Cookbook with Dawn Sakamoto Paiva, published by Ulysses Press on September 29, 2020. My essay, "Surrounded," was included in the 2022 Ever Given issue of We'll Never Have Paris. "Just Like" was published in Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World on Woodhall Press in 2022.
In May of 2023, The ‘Ohana Grill Cookbook will be out in paperback and it has been translated into German and available in Germany as Das Aloha Grillbuch.
I spent my twenties and early thirties in San Francisco, temping and writing and editing and marketing, and fronting a few indie-rock bands, opening for the Decemberists and The Arcade Fire in the US and underground bands in the UK and Europe, making notes for stories and novels from the tour van. In 2008 my husband and I welcomed our daughter to the world. Our son arrived in 2010. We landed in suburbia, remodeled a house, and grew tomatoes and peaches.
In the summer of 2017 I participated in the Tin House Summer’s Writer Workshop for my first novel-in-progress with Naomi Jackson. A few days after the workshop my family moved from Walnut Creek, California, to my hometown in Hawaii.
My essay, “Try Wait,” was published in the 2018 America issue of the zine We’ll Never Have Paris. I wrote The ‘Ohana Grill Cookbook with Dawn Sakamoto Paiva, published by Ulysses Press on September 29, 2020. My essay, "Surrounded," was included in the 2022 Ever Given issue of We'll Never Have Paris. "Just Like" was published in Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World on Woodhall Press in 2022.
In May of 2023, The ‘Ohana Grill Cookbook will be out in paperback and it has been translated into German and available in Germany as Das Aloha Grillbuch.