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- "Harley" nominated for the Pushcart Prize (2009)

- 3rd Place - Playboy Magazine's College Fiction Contest for "Elf Boy" (2008)

“The judges particularly admired the original setting and interrelationships that it displayed.”

- 1st Place - Seacoast Writer's Fiction Contest (2008) for "Lumberjack Girl"

"Our judge said "Lumberjack Girl" was far and away the best story in all the submissions. I was really impressed."
-Pam Gjettum Contest Chair

- 2008 Graduate of Southern New Hampshire University - Two Year Fellowship (MFA Program)

- Amoskeag Journal Editorial Board - 2007 and 2008

- New Hampshire Council for the Arts Literary Review Panel - 2007

- Semi-Finalist - Boston Fiction Festival - 2007

- University of New Hampshire Writers Academy (Instructor - 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009)

- New Hampshire Council for the Arts - Fiction Fellowship - 2005

- Sewanee Writers Conference - 2005

- Dorset Colony - 2004

- Kenyon Writers (2003), Seacoast Writers, Utah Writers at Work

What reviewers have to say about Peggy's work:

- "Peggy has a talent for drawing vivid, quirky characters through her feisty narration"

- "Her voice is extremely lively and engaging, and her charismatic characters are charming"

- "She’s a very funny writer with a great sense of narrative adventure.”

from Bob Begiebing, Director of Southern New Hampshire University's Writing Programs:

"I’m reminded by her writing of the demanding work of the high modernists--Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner--who ask the reader to fully participate in the labor and the rewards of understanding characters and narrative presentation/ techniques that try to take writer and reader on deeper explorations of human nature off on a tear than traditional or popular (genre) literature typically does.  Indeed, as a professional therapist, Peggy has staked out her fictional territory as the wild inner life of outsiders and misfits who suffer and glory in their complex, even disturbing, inner and outer lives.  By emphasizing more in the final collection the interrelatedness of the stories (through character naming and emphasis, subtitles, table of contents, and careful revisions) the final product will attract a broader audience than it might have otherwise.  Still, Peggy is not letting her readers off easy.  They will have to participate actively.
 
Her strongest attributes are her dark humor; her subtle and gradual (if often jarring) revelation of character, background, and incident; the energy of voice and narrative pacing; the unifying vision of people breaking down for all sorts of reasons, often being their own worst enemies; and the deft handling of scene.  She is a master at suggesting subtext, which Charles Baxter defined in part as “the hidden psychology of characters.”  She was accomplished at creating subtext before reading Baxter’s book about writing this semester, and more so afterwards. That by now all, or all but one, of the stories she has worked on during her two year MFA fellowship at SNHU have been accepted for publication is testimony to their quality and originality of voice."

"Peggy writes from the heart, the gut, the soul, and the street. She's aware of the fragility of her characters and often puts them in literal danger, only to show us how fate/faith/native intelligence will lead them through the dark patches and back into some sun. She's fearless in this way like very few writers these days, especially (I regret to say) women fiction writers. What astounds me about her work is that she is able to present the extraodinary beauty of humanity by not being afraid to reveal the flaws, dirt, and doubt of it all. Plus, she's got a gigantic and very earthy sense of humor. A rarity these days when plumbing the darker depts of experience.

Her writing is lucid, natural, blessed with a unique pace that is all Peggy. And her characters are people we know, people we want to know, who live with us long after we've finished the story."

- Emily Heckman, New York book editor (Grove Press, Bantam, S&S, etc.)