My novel Juliet's Nurse (published by Simon & Schuster) imagines the fourteen years leading up to the events in Romeo and Juliet from the perspective of one of William Shakespeare's most comic, tragic, and bawdy female characters.
My novel The Secrets of Mary Bowser (published by HarperCollins) was inspired by rumors of a Black woman who served as a Union spy during the Civil War by posing as a slave in the Confederate White House.
It is now my pleasure and my penance to be researching and writing a nonfiction biography of the real woman behind the "Mary Bowser" myth, who was part of a transatlantic nineteenth-century network of Black activists and white allies. This research is supported by grants from the American Philosophical Society, the National Archives Foundation, the Virginia Humanities Council, and other funders.
My poetry has appeared in literary journals, anthologies, a handsewn chapbook, and permanently inscribed on a hospital wall. My essays about race, gender, American culture, my love of my thesaurus, and various other topics have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and similar outlets, as well as in scholarly journals and academic books.
After earning degrees in history and literature at Harvard University, the University of Southern California, and UCLA, I taught on the faculty of UCLA and Reed College. These days, I teach in more informal settings, leading workshops and discussions at museums, libraries, art galleries, healthcare clinics, nonprofit organizations, and sometimes even in conjunction with leaders of 'ukulele classes, street choirs, or group bicycle rides. I love learning and appreciate sharing this love with others in so many different places and ways.
I believe we all need more joy, more connection, more reflection, and stronger bonds with friends, neighbors, and strangers, and I strive to cultivate those however I can.