About Me

Early life and Education

As I described in my memoir, What I Forgot…and Why I Remembered, I grew up amid the skyscrapers of Manhattan but was fortunate to spend weekends and summers at my parents’ country home in upstate New York. I have always been a country girl at heart.

I attended Hunter College High School and went to college early, earning a BA degree in English literature and journalism at 19 years old from Bard College/Simon’s Rock. After working as a reporter and photographer for small town newspapers for several years, I returned to NYC and worked my way up to managing editor of a New York business magazine, before returning to graduate school.

At New York University, I earned an MA and PhD in Comparative Literature; my dissertation focused on personal narratives from the Americas by people with complex cultural and individual identities, writing in Spanish, French and English. This led to my first edited book, Women Writing Resistance in Latin America & the Caribbean, now in its second edition from Beacon Press.

Parent, Professor and Community Organizer

For some 25 years, I raised my two sons, taught college classes, organized major annual conferences for International Women’s Day and served as the founding director of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, which offered year-round events featuring women writers in and around my home region in Massachusetts.

As I became increasingly engaged in promoting the power of creative expression as a vehicle for social and environmental activism (“writing to right the world”), I co-founded Green Fire Press, intended as an accessible publishing platform for “books that make the world better.”

During the Covid period, I co-founded a free virtual community for writers, Birth Your Truest Story, with my longtime friend and writing partner Audrey Kalman. You are most welcome to join our community, now hosted on Substack.

Award-winning Author

In the process of writing my own memoir, I coined the term “purposeful memoir” to designate life stories shared with the intention of benefiting others, and I published two award-winning guides about how to write in this genre: The Elemental Journey of Purposeful Memoir (Nautilus Silver Award, 2017) and Purposeful Memoir as a Quest for a Thriving Future (Nautilus Gold Award and Gold Independent Press Award, 2022).

My focus now: Writing to Right the World Together

I believe each of us has the potential to make the world better, just by our very presence and how we show up each day. We can choose to use our power of creative expression to become worldwrights, a term I coined taking off on the word playwrights: playwrights write plays, worldwrights write to right the world.

Whether I’m teaching a college class, leading a writing workshop or working one-on-one with an author, it’s my passion and my pleasure to help others share their creative voices and visions with purpose, power and clarity.

If I can help you bring your voice and vision more strongly into the world, don’t hesitate to be in touch.

Let’s write to right the world together!