Creative Work
My short stories have been published in Epiphany, The Coil, Arcturus Magazine, Capsule Stories, Peripheral Surveys, and as a collection available on Amazon. I was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2022 by Alternating Current Press for my story "Observations of Trans-Neptunian Objects." I’m currently looking for a home for a tragicomic novel about a country star and her entourage lost for 24 hours in Rio de Janeiro.
I'm currently an MFA student at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, I've been the writing assistant to Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Nilo Cruz, providing creative assistance, editing, and translation. I've been a regular at the San Francisco Writers Grotto since 2017.
I'm also a singer-songwriter on the Shorewave Records roster, and my recordings are available on any streaming service.
Short fiction, published in Epiphany, 2023
The pool water glowed as though a small child had taken toy scissors and cut a fanciful shape out of the cement, revealing the incandescent teal beneath. The surface was filmed with the reflection of the lights along the motel’s open-air hallways and, if Maria looked closely, the stars.
Observations of Trans-Neptunian Objects
Short fiction, published in The Coil, 2022
About 120 years ago, during a campaign against the U.S. Army in Cuba, several Spanish soldiers reported seeing a bluish burst in the sky that lasted no more than two seconds. The sun had set, but the sky was fluorescent, likely a chemical byproduct of artillery as the event occurred in the very heat of the Battle of Cienfuegos.
Short fiction, published in The Coil, 2022
They enter their home for the first time. They’ve both been here before, but it wasn’t their home then.
Treat is wheeled in backward. When the wheelchair lurches over the floor trim, he feels torn open all over again. He thinks he can hear the ambulance sirens, smell the recent rainwater in the pavement’s flumes. Jenna will learn how to be gentle with him.
The Fiancée
Short fiction, published in Arcturus Magazine, 2021
Miami was the city Managua dreamed of being and woke up shattered that it was not. All the colors shone confidently: the palm trees knew how green their fronds were expected to be, the streetlamps glowed an opulent white. The billboards were fresh, the neon sharper. They flew between LED skyscrapers, past the islands alongside MacArthur Causeway, through colors and music, voices and skin.
Short fiction, published in Capsule Stories: Isolation Edition, April 2020
The highways and streets that had led me from San Francisco to our little Washington town of Meadow Glade had been vacant strips of gray, like something written in pencil and then hurriedly erased. Ten hours of driving with the feeling of having just forgotten something; exhausted though all I’d done was keep my car straight.
My parents’ garage door was opened, but I stopped short of it. I staggered out of my pre-pre-pre-owned Impala, and smiled at my parents across the no man’s land of our yard.
Single, released May 2020
This changes nothing, we weren't ever too close.
Olivia's moving back to the east coast.
Felt so good to be near you, but I can keep myself warm.
She thinks she'd feel better living closer to home.
I can see her walking away, but they make it so easy to stay where you've always lived.
Took the 1 down to Half Moon, thought even oceans must end.
Olivia's scared of being just somebody's girlfriend.
You’re always with somebody else, you keep changing partners cause you can’t change yourself.
But now you've got nowhere to go, stay home watching reruns in yesterday’s clothes.
Just slow down and watch her, lay and relax, nothing can stop her, she shatters like glass.
Dissolving in water, melting like wax, a stop motion camera, she's moving too fast.
— Stop Motion Camera, 2016
