About Me

I write with purpose. In my fiction, I weave current issues into a story to raise awareness and share a perspective. My nonfiction is intended to help children and their caregivers. I'm concerned about the world we live in and I want to make it a better place.

I was born outside of New York City but grew up in central Pennsylvania, a beautiful area with rich farmland and forests separating the small towns. My childhood was spent on a farm, playing in "the woods," as we called the sixty acres behind our house, and gaining an appreciation for nature, both domesticated and wild. Instead of going on vacations to different places, my parents purchased a small cabin on a river in upstate New York where I spent summers fishing and exploring.

I attended Dickinson College, the University of East Anglia in England, and the Aegean Institute in Greece. I studied history, music, archaeology, mythology, and even took a class on the development and spread of timber-framed buildings—any topic that stirred my imagination. After college, I studied violin-making and restoration, ran my own shop for a few years where I developed the nerves to work on instruments far above my personal net worth, then moved to Boston where I one day sat down and started to write. And I couldn’t stop.

After penning a few short stories, I enrolled in fiction and journalism classes at the Harvard Extension School and at Grub Street. I joined and then led a writing group sponsored by the Boston Public Library where I learned the tremendous value of constructive criticism. One of the stories I was working on at the time grew and grew until it became my first novel draft.

While my training has been somewhat informal, my work has not gone unnoticed. That accidental first novel draft, written over twenty years ago, was offered representation by a major New York agency, but on the advice of a well-intentioned family friend, I turned it down (a long story, the kind best shared in the back of a bar over a decent dram at the end of a long night). I spent the next decade honing my skills, which appears to have paid off as my first published book, Bitiopa, for middle grade readers, was named one of the best books of the year by Kirkus Reviews. A nonfiction comic-style guide, also for middle grade, followed, and was not only adopted by schools and by a major health care organization, but also was at one point used as a college text book. On the basis of my bullying-related writing, I was invited by the Boston Public School district to create a comprehensive bullying prevention program (www.circlepointprogram.org), which we piloted to great success, and I was invited to be the bullying prevention educator for a life skills program offered by Mass General Hospital. An adult manuscript, a work in progress, was recently rated 9.5/10 by BookLife. And my latest work in progress, Knight Without Ceremony, a YA novel, was selected as a semi finalist for the 2023 BookLife Prize. Along the way, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to adults and students about both my fiction and nonfiction.

Although I have been at this for some time, I feel as though I am just getting started. Although I just finished my YA novel draft, the first book in a duology, I've already dived into the second half of the story. And with my two boys now becoming young adults themselves and who have less and less need of my time and attention—a great joy to see yet stingingly bittersweet—I’m able to spend more and more time at this. I already have my next four books in mind, and I can’t wait to put them to paper.

Thank you for reading.