I was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1967 and raised in Colorado and New England. The most profound year of my life so far was the 1988-1989 school year I lived in Bogotá, Colombia with the HECUA study abroad program. After graduating from Williams College in 1990, I lived in Taiwan from 1990 to 1992, teaching English and studying Mandarin. I have a Master's in linguistics and a PhD in English, both from the University of Texas at Austin, where I taught courses in writing, linguistics, and literature. I was also a visiting assistant professor at Southwestern University from 1999 to 2001.

A linguist by training, I'm a writer by birth. I've written for newspapers since I was 14, throughout high school, and in college. In 2000, I decided to pursue a writing career. The transition from academia made for the second most profound year of my life. I'm committed to marrying narrative power to specialist knowledge, and to helping produce a more mature discourse about language in the US. I'm also committed to doing so accurately, responsibly, and creatively.

My journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, Wired, Salon, Slate, the New Republic, the New Scientist, Foreign Policy, Reason, Lingua Franca, Legal Affairs, and the Texas Observer. Essays have also appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the North American Review, and The Morning News. Fiction has been published in Nightsun and the North American Review, which first published "Beyond the Point," a story that was selected for New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1999, edited by Shannon Ravenel.