I live in Chicago with my husband, two children, a dog, a parakeet, sometimes chicks and a part-time fish.My writing has won the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Christopher Award, and the SCBWI-Illinois Laura Crawford Memorial Mentorship, and my essays and poetry have appeared in collections and literary journals including The Bellingham Review, Creative Nonfiction and River Teeth.I have an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. I teach calculus and number theory classes at Northwestern University. I am the managing editor for the SCBWI-IL Prairie Wind. And I’m the writer-in-residence at St. Gregory the Great, where I have a little office in a big building with a bad internet connection, so I actually get some work done (in theory).