I grew up in South Georgia, where the summers are long and the stories are longer. I was the kind of kid who collected other people’s memories — the ones told on front porches after supper, the ones that came out sideways during long drives down empty roads.

I’ve always been drawn to the complicated parts of Southern life — the beauty and the burden of it, the way love and legacy get tangled up together in a family’s history. That tension is what I write toward.

My debut novel, Claiming Mercer, is a Southern Gothic romance set on a sprawling South Georgia estate. It’s a story about a woman coming home after years away, the land waiting for her, and the man she left behind who never quite left.

When I’m not writing, I’m probably somewhere outside — on horseback, or just walking a field at golden hour, trying to remember exactly the way the light looked.