About

I’m a novelist, short story writer, and MFA student in the Creative Writing program at The New School in New York City. In the past, I’ve studied history, comparative literature & society, and English & American literature at Columbia University and New York University. I write mainly in the genres of literary historical fiction and science fiction, drawn to stories exploring themes of power, oppression, resistance, and social change from a socialist perspective.

Novels

A New World: Book One of the Neos Kosmos Series

To save a world, they must fight for a new one.

Aboard the generation ship Neos Kosmos, astrobiologist Vivya Wilsen knows what the data says: landing on their planetary destination, New-Earth, will lead to ecological catastrophe. But after a 1,200-year journey through interstellar space, the Cosmos religion believes that New-Earth is humanity’s destined world. The ship’s technocratic Directors have dismissed Vivya’s warnings as alarmism and heresy.

When Vivya meets Liya Sina—a biome technician and anarchist—tensions emerge from their clashing political approaches. Liya is everything Vivya isn’t: optimistic, spontaneous, convinced that organizing can change the world. Vivya wants to work within the system. Liya wants to tear it down. Vivya wants to convince experts with scientific evidence. Liya wants to transform their society from the ground up.

Driven by a shared aim of saving New-Earth, Vivya hesitantly joins Liya’s coalition demanding democracy, equality, and an alternate planetary destination. But with landing only months away, changing course to a harsh, lifeless planet will mean challenging everything their society believes about faith, destiny and home.

What neither of them factored into their political strategy was falling in love. Vivya, battling depression, struggles to believe they deserve happiness when a world is at stake. Liya fears that loving someone will make them vulnerable, a liability they can’t afford when the revolution depends on them.

When the Directors threaten to crush their movement, Vivya and Liya must decide: will they compromise their demands to stay together, or risk everything—their freedom, their lives, their love—to save a world and build a better one?

In A New World, the sapphic romance of Emily Hamilton’s The Stars Too Fondly meets the ecological hard sci-fi worldbuilding of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay.

This is my current work-in-progress. If you’re interested in my worldbuilding and research process, subscribe to my Speculative Worlds newsletter.

The American Inferno Series

The American Inferno series follows two families in a Virginia town from the 1840s to the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Lucille, an enslaved woman who passes for white, searches for the freedom and love she’s been denied all her life. Gabriel, an enslaved field worker, fights for justice against his father who’s also his enslaver. His half-brother Adam, heir to their father’s plantation, faces a moral struggle with his own society.

As the pre-war order collapses, each will have to choose how far they will go—and what they will become—in the fight for freedom or the preservation of power. The American Inferno reckons with oppression’s destructive toll on both enslaver and enslaved, and the necessity of resistance against systems that deny human dignity.

The Human Family: Book One of The American Inferno

“A fragile, worthless kind of love it had been—a love that could be so easily traded for two thousand one hundred dollars.”

All her life, Lucille has dreamed of freedom. When she overhears that her father and enslaver, Joseph Wright, will soon be compelled to sell her to pay his debts, she must risk everything to escape, or be condemned to an even more violent enslavement. Joseph, facing the collapse of his self-justifications, must choose whether to free Lucille or preserve the social order on which he’s built his life.

As yellow fever ravages their Virginia town, Lucille and Joseph’s fates become interwoven through a chain of credit, sales, and promises with the lives of other inhabitants: a ruthless, profit-seeking planter; and a preacher whose secret abolitionist faith may cost him his life.

In a system that commodifies human life, they all must decide what they are willing to sacrifice—for love, for power, for what they believe is right, and for the chance to be free.

Excerpt from opening chapter published in Issue 23 of Embark. 

Interested in my work?  

I’m still seeking publication for my novels and short fiction, but if you’re interested in my stories, get in touch with me via the Contact Me page. I’m happy to share my stories with you in exchange for your opinion as a beta reader! Or, subscribe to my newsletter below for updates when my stories are published.