Short Fiction

A Pilgrimage of Ghosts

A young man seeks the truth of what happened to his sister after she disappears while trying to reach the United States from Guatemala. Meanwhile his sister, narrating from the afterlife, seeks to find her way back to the world of the living.

Forthcoming at Unlikely Stories

Maximum Entropy

A German chemist flees from potential arrest in the early years of the Nazi regime. As he travels by train to escape Gestapo agents, he reflects on the nature of time and his wife's death by suicide twenty years before.

Novels

The Human Family: Book One of the American Inferno Series

As an enslaved fifteen-year-old girl in antebellum Virginia, Lucille has spent her whole life longing for freedom. Her enslaver, Joseph Wright, is also her father. Now he faces a choice: sell the three people he enslaves—including his daughter Lucille—to pay his debts, or find a way to set Lucille free. Joseph cannot help loving Lucille despite his pro-slavery beliefs, but to free her would mean financial ruin for his family. For Lucille, being sold would mean a life of greater misery with little hope of freedom. Despite the dangers, she has no choice but to take freedom into her own hands by planning an escape.

The ruthless planter Thomas Bailey will stop at nothing to pursue his interests: maximize his profits—including collecting Joseph’s debts—uphold the social fabric of slavery, and train his heir, Adam, to follow in his footsteps. But Adam struggles to reconcile slavery with his moral instincts. As his enslaved half-brother and childhood friend Gabriel confronts him with devastating secrets, Adam begins to question his whole way of life.

The town’s new preacher, Robert Walker, harbors a dangerous secret: his abolitionism. If Robert preaches his beliefs, he could lose his job, his family, even his life. If he doesn’t, he fears he may lose his soul. When Joseph approaches him with a desperate plea, Robert decides his salvation lies in helping Lucille to freedom.

As death looms from a yellow fever epidemic, slavery’s chains bind the enslaved and their enslavers alike. Each person has a choice to make: is holding onto their deeply-held beliefs worth the cost?