Reading in the time of COVID-19
Old New Worlds Part II Chapter Fourteen As my contralto-nutritionist friend Monica Reinagel has pointed out, “By now, you've gotten emails from every website and business you've ever visited, announcing how they are responding to current...
Belatedly posting my spring newsletter
My friend Kristine—the genealogist who helped me to search for Sarah in Old New Worlds—sent me this quote from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: East Coker after I lost my sister, Anne, to pulmonary fibrosis three weeks ago. Anne was the one who brought our family’s African...
Agatha Christie from the page to the stage
It’s fun trying to mix it up with the BookNotes segment on WBJC each month, and when I heard that Everyman Theatre was putting on the first-ever stage adaptation of Agatha Christie’s iconic whodunit, Murder on the Orient Express, my interest was immediately piqued....
The Winter Newsletter
“Writing—like broadcasting—is a rather solitary pursuit.”
The Ides of October
At the exact half way point between my Fall and Winter newsletters, I'm slipping in an extra one because ... the moment is finally here! The national (and international) Pub Date of the hardcover of Old New Worlds is today, October 15th 2019. Three years of writing...
My Reading List at The Rumpus
If anyone had told me a year ago that I would be published in The Rumpus—along with the likes of Roxane Gay, Rick Moody, Cheryl Strayed, Steve Almond, et al—I would have thought I was dreaming. Yet, thanks to Creative Strategist, Ben Tanzer, it turns out to be...
Fall Newsletter: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness …”
This was my view for much of the past month while I was recording the audiobook of Old New Worlds. As I recount in the book, The first time I had to share my words when I started the MFA program, I wanted to climb right back inside myself from sheer awkwardness and...
The Tiny Letter giveaway
As an incentive to sign up for my newsletter, I offered a framed print of this painting by my mother, which inspired the cover of Old New Worlds. The youngest twig of our family tree, Lizzy, made the pick! Watch it here.
Priceless birthday presents
Tucked away in the basement of this building on the leafy campus of Johns Hopkins University, is the Department of Conservation & Preservation of the Sheridan Libraries. It was here that I went early this year to meet Jennifer Jarvis, a Book & Paper...
#Celebrateimmigrants
"Every writer has only one story to tell" —James Baldwin In my case, I wouldn't even have been a writer if telling my story hadn't compelled me; after I became an immigrant twenty-two years ago, I simply hadto write about it. So now, on this first day of June, the...
New Book
