She received her B.A. at New York University and her M.F.A. at Columbia University. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University, where she has taught since 1991.

She lives in Pittsburgh with Jeffrey F. Cohn, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, and is the mother of Rachel Glynn and filmmaker Charlotte Glynn.

Her short works have been widely published in journals and magazines, among them, the New York Times Magazine, Glamour, Self, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, and Massachusetts Review.

From 1974 to 1993, she worked as a screenwriter. Her cowritten screenplay for Seven Minutes in Heaven was released by Warner Brothers in 1986. The movie won a Special Merit Award at the U.S. Film Festival, Santa Barbara, CA in 1987 and an audience award at the Sundance Film Festival, 1986.

She was twice the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, in 1982 – 1983 and in 2000 – 2001. She was also awarded a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Media Arts in 1995 and in Creative Writing in 2002. Other fellowships and awards include two New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships, and in 2004, a Fulbright Fellowship, which she spent at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. Awards for her essays include The Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing in 2001.

In the summer of 1977, while helping director Jonathan Kaplan cast the film Over the Edge, a teen rebellion film that was released in 1979, she found Matt Dillon at the Hommocks Middle School in Larchmont, NY, thus launching his acting career.