About Me
I grew up in Buffalo, New York with my parents, two brothers and a dog, named Tigere, on the mistaken assumption that this was French for “tiger”. I started writing when I was twelve, or perhaps even younger, publishing my first (and last) poem in a fourth grade newsletter.
I studied International Politics at Johns Hopkins University, and learned a lot about grass-roots organizing from veteran Baltimore organizers, Kathy Shaafsma and Mike Bardoff (whose name you might see in the Amethyst Road). During and after college, I worked with the Central American Solidarity Committee, the Nuclear Freeze and the Johns Hopkins Anti-Apartheid Coalition. I also wrote short stories, and put together a ‘zine with some friends (Rupert Wondolowski et al.) called Shattered Wig Review.
After earning a graduate degree in English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, I moved to Seoul, South Korea, to teach English as a Foreign Language, and to hang out more with my terrific friend Sung Rim Lee, who lived there at that time. I got to do things like eat kimchee for breakfast, go dancing a lot, see student pro-democracy demonstrations (and get a snoot full of teargas in the process), go to Buddha’s birthday celebrations, attend a shamanist funeral and make lots of friends.
Probably most importantly, I met a very tall, very smart, very funny Englishman named Richard Moore, and we decided to get married. We also decided to travel around Asia a lot. We went to the Philippines and hiked through the rice terraces. We took the ‘slow boat’ to China, where we walked on the Great Wall, visited the Forbidden City, and went mountain biking in Guilin, where I got the worst sunburn of my life. We also visited Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand, which were equally magical and exhausting and exciting.
In 1993, we moved back to the U.S. and settled down in Seattle. I started running an anti-bias education program in schools in the Northwest for the Anti-Defamation League. I stopped working for a while to take care of our two small sons, Levi and Joseph. When they were babies and napped a lot, I started writing novels. When Joe was two and Levi was four, I started writing The Amethyst Road. It was published when they were six and eight.
I'm now teaching English and History at Cascadia Community College and working on another novel.