Born in Los Angeles and raised in Austin, TX and New York City, CJ finds her truest home in America’s highways and backcountry. She now lives in California with her boyfriend and rescue dogs, and you can almost always find them out on the road, reading, writing, oddity-hunting, somewhere.

CJ holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and a BA from NYU’s Gallatin School, where she studied Mythology and the Middle Ages.

In her novels, CJ is interested largely in Place, each town or city or state singular and unique in the ways they birth their inhabitants and vice versa. She is continually in awe of the bounty of strangeness, horror, and beauty that this country affords us, in all the exposed and hidden corners. Her true loves are deeply flawed loners and misanthropes, recluses and outsiders, those called to live beyond the confines of a traditional life. Freaks, monsters, adventurers. She is a helpless sucker for old dogs and “special” dogs, for dive bars, storms, cocktails, illuminated manuscripts, roadside attractions, and all things Star Trek.

Alongside Maeve Fly and American Rapture, CJ has another novel coming from Nightfire.