One thousand hours spent washing, labeling, mending, and cataloguing colonial-era artifacts at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park Archeology Lab trained me to see how we construct identity and express what we value through the things we keep by choice or accident. In Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home, I applied an archaeologist’s lens to my own life, writing to recover a sense of home as I lost my mother to Alzheimer’s disease.

Our lives are entangled with objects in complex and interesting ways that I continue to explore in new writing projects; teaching workshops on the role artifacts play in family, community, or historical narratives; appearing as a guest on the When the Flames Go Up and Tesse Talks podcasts to discuss the emotional challenges of what I call “grief cleaning”; and leading sessions with physicians on everyday objects as tools in the practice of listening, witnessing, and healing.

A novelist and essayist, I have published literary work with the world’s largest publisher and with a small university press; I have written under a pseudonym for the YA mass market, and contributed a novella to a series promoting adult literacy. I have twice been named a discipline winner in fiction by the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, and have received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Breadloaf Writers Conference, Millay Colony for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. My writing has been selected as notable in Best American Essays and has appeared most recently in Cleaver, Creative Nonfiction, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin.

Photo credit: Paola Nogueras