Writer, Speaker, Traveler.

Born on a summer evening in Andalusia to an American father and a Tibetan mother, I lived in Spain for two years, Darjeeling and Kathmandu for a year, and then moved to the States. My fiction, essays, and interviews have been published by The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, AGNI, Catapult, Granta, and the HuffPost. My writing also appears in Women in Clothes (Penguin) and American Dragons (HarperCollins); a translation of fiction by Reinaldo Arenas was published in Old Rosa (Grove). 

Current projects include a memoir about reconnecting with my Tibetan roots on a mother-daughter pilgrimage to my ancestral homeland. The book explores identity and family legacy, dialogue across generations and borders, and the responsibility of individual and collective memory. It’s a story of dreams of the past and hopes for the future, of pilgrimage as a quest for home and self, of how, by following our ancestors’ paths on the land and in the heart, we can carry their story—and our own—forward.

I speak and teach workshops in the U.S., Asia, and Europe, at The Rubin Museum of Art, the Asia Society, Princeton University, Columbia University, and La Porte Peinte Centre Pour les Arts, among others. I studied Comparative Literature at Princeton and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, where I won the Hopwood Award. My travels and work have taken me around the world, to India, Tibet, France, Spain, Cuba, Thailand, Bali, and many other countries. A longtime resident of Tokyo, I teach literature at a Japanese university.