Now available at Barnes and Noble, Unleash Press, and Amazon

Recipient of the 2022 Unleash Press Book Prize

Recipient of the 2021 Rona Jaffe Foundation Breadloaf Writers Conference Scholar Award

Nominated for the 2023 National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway AWard, and the National Book Critics Circle Award

Unknown and unattached, Maggie Morris moves through her days as a polished collection of patterns. Her only honest relationship is with the dormant tree outside her Brooklyn loft window. When she unexpectedly runs into her childhood best friend, Dana, a Tsalagi girl who suddenly disappeared the summer they turned nine, Dana’s cryptic references about the events surrounding her disappearance launches Maggie down a rabbit hole not only about that long ago summer, but about who she’s become and why. 

Magpie explores appropriation and masking as the means through which an undiagnosed autistic woman builds a functional identity, burying her true one in the process. Maggie is difficult, odd, and soulful—in search of not only answers to a childhood mystery, but an authenticity she has no idea how to recognize.

2023 Midwest Book Review -   

Paths divided by circumstance and life can sometimes cross again, but those linked by memory have since become someone else as time passes -- especially when a death and a disappearance introduced an estrangement that has lasted for decades. In Magpie, these two now-disparate former friends are thrown back together in an unexpected, unusual manner that introduces past memories and conundrums into present-day experiences. The circumstances involving a mother's death, a Tsalagi woman who also vanished from Maggie's childhood, and a mystery that threatens to raise long-repressed memories about what really happened make for a vivid read.

For some readers, this novel will stir unpleasant memories of choices towards peace over adventure; predictability over excitement. As Maggie moves into many revelations, so readers will find their hearts tugged and challenged by her self-discoveries and the truth that lies at the center of her adult choices.

Readers and libraries looking for novels about friendship, mystery, growth, and "Being part of the wild things that surround me...Not separate. Part of something bigger." will find Maggie a powerful story. It ideally will reach a wide audience with its landscapes of seasonal and relationship transformations.

"The wry, idiosyncratic, yet deeply vulnerable voice Carson elevates in Magpie, speaks for so many of us" - Laura Cronk, author of Ghost Hour and Having Been an Accomplice

"A tour de force of narrative consciousness in the tradition of Jonathan Lethem,  Magpie immerses the reader in a compelling mystery and social critique."

- Jamie Price, Ph.D., author of The Call 

Sundance Co//ab

Feature film in development in partnership with LaWanda Hopkins. 

Sundance Co//ab

"Truth like death, kills what came before."

Full length play inspired by Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero.

(Finalist, Doug & Victoria Ross Foundation - Playwriting Award)

Hybrid physical theatre play about gender shaming and purity hazing of young females in church youth groups.

*Act I draft published in MeetingHouse Literary Journal (Dec. 2020) 

One act play

Immersive physical theatre

Full length play in development 

Perception, collective agreements, and how we define "mental health"