Skunk Cabbage

March 2026

Another story in my Island Girl series, A Gust from the Sea, about immigration, loneliness, and getting tired of that old college boyfriend, will be published in Jimson Weed, the annual literary journal of the Department of Language and Literature at University of Virginia’s College in Wise, Virginia. Regrettably, the journal is print only. For directions about how to order it, click here.

January 2026

Another story in my Island Girls series, Telling, about teenage sex, talking to your mother, and what those gynecological exams are really like, has been published in the online literary journal Litbreak Magazine, to read it, click here.

August 2025

Another short story in my Island Girls series, Delicioso, about food, fitting in, and how the classroom troublemaker can suddenly turn into a human being, has been published in the online literary journal Bewildering Stories, to read it click here.

December 2024

It is with great pleasure that I announce that my essay Navalny, Poetry, and Truth has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Pangyrus Literary Magazine. Should you wish to read or reread my essay, click here. If you would like to see all six of Pangyrus’s Pushcart Prize Nominations, click here.

October/November 2024

One of the short stories in my Island Girl series, Graduation Day, has been published in the 2024 Connecticut Literary Anthology in conjunction with Woodhall Press. Unfortunately, there is no online link to the story, but if you would like to hear me reading excerpts from my story, you can RSVP here for the online reading on Wednesday November 13th at 6:30 pm.

April 2024

Check out my essay about the tragic death of the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and the repression of independent voices in present day Russia that increasingly mirrors the repression of the Stalin dictatorship. You can read it in Pangyrus Literary Magazine.

Check out my latest short story Island Girls in Marrow Magazine about young girls of color growing up in a neighborhood that isn’t particularly kind to them.

January 2023

I am delighted to announce that Glass Mountain Literary Magazine has published my short story Retention in their current issue. You can read the story here.

September 2022

Watch a video of me reading a live version of a blog about the Berlin Wall, The Wall I Knew.

July 2022

Watch a video of me reading a live version of my blog, The Last of the Best.

May 2022

I’m excited to announce three pieces of my writing have recently been published. What Ever Happened to Igor, an essay in Pangyrus, is about a study trip I took to Ukraine in 1985 with a group of Finns and Swedes. Igor was a young Ukrainian-Swedish man from Stockholm who was going to meet his father in Kyiv, a father he hadn’t seen in twenty years. Want to watch a video of me reading the essay? Click here. Will They Make it Home Again?, another essay in Pangyrus, explores the relationship between the images of World War Two childhood evacuations recorded in select works of European literature and the images of evacuation we now see on our television screens from Ukraine. Click here to watch the video.

Finally, The Longest Day, is a short story published in the 2022 Freshwater Literary Journal. It details the experience of a young non-English speaking Cape Verdean girl, Gee, on her first day in an American inner-city school. It is an account of Gee’s first encounter with her new ESL teacher and the safe space this teacher creates for Gee to express her true emotions. Watch a You Tube video of me speaking with Georbina DaRosa, the real-life inspiration for my story.