About Me

I write with purpose. In my fiction, I weave current issues into my stories to raise awareness and share a perspective. My nonfiction is intended to help children and their caregivers avoid and address bullying problems. 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, I spent summers in a small cabin on a river in upstate New York where I fished and explored.

I attended Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, 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 at my desk in my small apartment on Westland Avenue and started to write. 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 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 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. Based on that work, I was invited to be the bullying prevention educator for a life skills program offered by one of the nation's premier medical organizations, Massachusetts General Hospital.

After years of focus on bullying prevention, I returned my focus to fiction, where I intend to keep it until, as they say, the gray matter starts to turn. My latest book, the first installment of Knights Without Ceremony, won two book awards and received additional recognition as a notable book. The second book in the duology is well underway. I'm seeking representation for an adult manuscript, a romance/religious thriller mashup that has gone through years of editing and revision. And I've already outlined and written parts of my next two novels, a YA romance along the lines of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, and an adult cli-fi work that I started in 2014 and put aside to heed the call for the bullying prevention solutions.

Although I have been at this for some time, I feel as though I am just getting started. With my two boys now becoming young adults themselves and who have less and less need of my time and attention—a most bittersweet joy —I’m able to spend more and more time at this. My current writing projects will take me to the end of the decade at least. And I already have two books for the start of the 2030s in mind. More—much more—to come.

Thank you for reading.