Writer • Poet • Activist
I have a PhD in rhetoric and composition from Wayne State University, where I taught composition before also teaching at the University of Toledo. For the past twenty-five years, I’ve turned my attention to my own writing. My poems have appeared in Forage Poetry and the Garfield Lake Review, but fiction is where I most often find myself, weaving pieces of my own experience into the lives and worlds I create.
My debut novel, All That I’m Asking, grows from my New York City roots and from the political awakening I experienced during the turbulent 1960s. A month before I graduated from Oberlin College in 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters at nearby Kent State University, killing four students and injuring others. Oberlin welcomed survivors to our campus, and I watched them move among us, shattered by what they had experienced. That moment changed the way I understood the vulnerability of ordinary citizens in the face of government power and helped shape the activist I remain today.
In All That I’m Asking, I return to the urgency and possibility of that era through Alice Kaplan, a young woman coming into her own and finding her voice as the country itself struggles toward greater fairness and justice.
All That I’m Asking is available from Rootstock Publishing.
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All That I’m Asking
My story and what shapes my work
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Poetry, Reflections, and More