For Real, Telling Stories

Professionally I have been a social entrepreneur starting out in community service and development before shifting to international humanitarian and development and human rights focused on democracy. Kenya, China, and South Africa are places where I have done some of this work as well as communities in Boston. Before Boston I arrived on an educational current from the Gulf Coast.

I am an ordinary person from Mobile, Alabama. I am from the South, always heading North. I write to find a way to live in service to others through words curated by variegated life.

William Faulkner, Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy, Twain, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Milosz, Heaney, Tolkien, and Walcott are some of my influences and favorite authors. I have a long term reading project to read all the Nobel Prize winners- to read at least two books of each. My first literary influence was my mother, a registered nurse with a degree in journalism and literature. Always buying books rather than toys. Always reading. Always telling stories. Always captivated by stories. Always curious. She is the writer who never became, because she was a single mother under obligation, duty, necessity and eventually concluded that her dreams were not sustainable in her daily realities.