Thirty years after she marched in an Indiana high school band, she returned to the state, moving her family to Elkhart to immerse herself in the story of the Concord High School Marching Minutemen. She received a bachelor’s degree in English and American literature and language from Harvard and Radcliffe College and received a master’s in literature from the University of Wisconsin, where she won a fiction prize. She lives in New Hampshire with the writer Jim Collins and their two children.