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 undergraduate 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 this city, 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. Cookie 🐶, a Pom-mix rescue from Indonesia whom the cats hate, is a regular visitor.

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 some wonderful new writer friends.

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

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.)