My Writing Journey...

Unlike many other authors, I didn't always know I wanted to write, and I’d be lying if I said I was an avid reader as a child. Instead, my fondest childhood memories are of me playing outside in Queens, New York in the 80s and 90s.  (If you’re trying to calculate my age, please press the back button on your browser)

Those were the days. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the scorching heat of the New York summer, see the blur of a double dutch rope turning in perfect circles, and hear the bass of a passing car, blasting the latest hip-hop song as we neighborhood kids sang along. On rainy days, I’d stay inside writing poetry, or my own verse to that same rap song.  Yes, those were the days, those blissful summer days where nothing was ever planned, yet somehow we were able to find adventure when we weren’t even looking for it.

I was always good at math and sciences, so years later I ended up in a career in analytics. But there was always a part of me that desired to do something more creative. In 2013 my life was turned upside down when my husband and I moved to Nairobi, Kenya on an expat assignment. But it wasn’t until 2016 that I encountered my biggest adventure yet: motherhood.

Parenting is not for the weak, and my daughter Selah worked with every fiber in her being to prove that to me. While she is super sweet now, when she was small she was A LOT. She needed routine and our daily story time became one of her favorite parts of the day. Selah absolutely loved it. Every night without fail, I'd read the same stories over and over again, and she would beam each time as if it was the first time she'd heard them. It was one of my favorite parts of the day as well.  I loved how the words would roll off my tongue like a hip-hop song, the clever characters, the funny and heartwarming endings. I loved the way some stories hit home for me as well.  Those stories took us on adventures every night.

A couple of years later, our storytime was crashed by another book lover, my son Elijah (who is A LOT MORE). Just like his sister, he loved storytime. After a while, I knew I wanted to write stories for them and kids like them, and thus, my writing journey began.

We're a family of five now (I have another son, Judah, who was born in 2020), and we now live between Johannesburg, South Africa, and Atlanta, GA. Besides that, not much has changed. My life continues to be an adventure, and I would love nothing more than to write books that take children on adventures of their own.