About

I was born in Paris! 🇫🇷 Sort of exciting, but I was two when my family left France, so I mostly enjoyed the city from my stroller. Still, that’s probably where my love of pigeons 🐦started. Since then, I’ve added baguettes 🥖 and Matisse's work to the list.

In between then and now I lived in a bunch of other places such as Venezuela, where I learned about toucans, and Israel, where I picked watermelons 🍉 all day for weeks, and eventually Japan where I ate whale (first and last time), watched a rooster 🐓 with feathers being carved out of a ginormous block of ice, visited a bronze statue of Buddha that weighs 121 tons and read manga at midnight in a Konbini (convenience store). I lived and worked in Japan 🇯🇵 after college and graduate degrees in Asian Studies.

I met my now-husband on a subway platform in Tokyo on our way to dinner at an African food restaurant. I think the food was tasty, but I don’t really remember…💖

Back in the U.S., I worked in Corporate Marketing in NYC for years until 9/11 when my family’s downtown apartment was damaged. After all our friends left the neighborhood, we decided to trade in city life for the Maryland suburbs of D.C. 🌸

Homesick for New York, I wrote my first story—about a girl who finds an injured pigeon on the street in Brooklyn. Then I wrote a D.C. travel guide for kids. Researching the monuments 🏛️, museums and parks made me love D.C. too.

I have three young adult kids who’ve filled my office with stunning, hand-drawn cards, taught me to take a solid selfie 📸 and introduced me to the best jazz clubs 🎺in NYC.

Miso and Boots, the feline family pets, 🐈🐈‍⬛,were rescued from a box by a dumpster. At first they had fleas, but now their fur is soft and silky. They tease stink bugs, knock over plants and chase dots of light reflected off my watch. Joining them in the house is Zuki, the sweetest bearded dragon🦎, whose favorite food is dandelion flowers and who keeps busy burrowing under computer paper or watching squirrels out the window. When Cookie 🐶, a Pom-mix rescue comes to visit, she loves to taunt the cats.

Not exactly a pet, but I also have compost worms 🐛 housed in a “Worm Pagoda.” They eat leftover veggie peel and eggshells which make rich soil (via their 💩) which gets dumped on my garden plants. My worms are the secret to my green thumb.

In addition to animals and plants, other loves of mine are reading books 📚 and magazines such as The New Yorker (unfortunately, missing annotated notes by my mother). Also, word games: Scrabble, Wheel of Fortune and Wordle.

In 2020 I graduated with an MFA in Writing for Kids and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts 💚. It was a rewarding experience and I made lots of new friends.

I work as a substitute teacher in Montgomery County, MD. 📝 My primary area of focus is ELL and Special Education students, though I help out in all K-12 classrooms. Subbing is hard, but I love it. In the evenings, I tutor Japanese students in English. 🇯🇵

The balance of my time is spent helping to care for my brother, Daniel (a huge sports fan ⚾️). I am a rare disease ally and advocate for the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association. (PWS is the syndrome my brother was born with.)