“I write to make peace with the things I cannot control…I write to
honor beauty…I write to the questions that shatter my sleep…I write as an act of faith…I write because I believe in words…I write because it belongs to the force of the moon: high tide, low tide.”

Terry Tempest Williams

MEMOIR: A Hard Rain: A Memoir of Revolution, Romance, and a Radio Station chronicles my experiences living and working in Havana in the early 1990s. This memoir explores fundamental questions about how we build a more just and peaceful world, about truth and observation, and about love.

A Hard Rain: prologue (PDF file)

“There are no truths, only stories.” Simon Ortiz

FICTION: I am currently working on a series of novels for young adults that feature time-traveling teenagers on a quest to save the planet. In the first book, Maya finds herself unwillingly transported back to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the summer of 1967. Her journey into the world of hippies and political activists challenges the preconceptions that Maya had held about this time period and offers invaluable lessons about how people can transform their society. Click here to read an excerpt.

The second book in this series will feature a young man who time travels to Haiti during the eighteenth century when slaves led a rebellion that resulted in that nation’s independence.

The third book in this series will feature a teenager who travels back to different periods of Central American history: from the ancient world of the Maya to a recent episode in Guatemala’s civil war.

I have an insatiable passion for history and a compulsion to make it exciting for young adults. I am also intrigued by the supernatural and our untapped psychic powers; fiction offers a way to explore these themes.

“Some stories are true that never happened.” Elie Wiesel.

ON TEACHING: I write about best practices in teaching for Edutopia.com and occasionally for Teacher Magazine (http://www.edweek.org/tm/)

An East Oakland Odyssey: Exploring the Love of Reading in a Small School, published by the National Writing Project, (2006) describes my efforts to change my middle school students’ attitudes about reading.