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 genre of literary historical fiction, drawn to stories exploring themes of power, oppression, resistance, and social change from a socialist perspective.
Novels
The American Inferno series is an epic saga of two families in Virginia, the Wrights and the Baileys, from the antebellum years through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Lucille, an enslaved woman who passes for white to escape her past, searches for the freedom and love she’s been denied all her life. Gabriel, an enslaved field worker who longs for a better life, 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. Their paths collide in a sweeping tale of forbidden love, resistance, and redemption.
The Human Family: Book One of The American Inferno Series
When Lucille learns that her father and enslaver Joseph Wright will soon be legally compelled to sell her to pay his debts, she must find a way to escape, or risk being sold into a life of even greater exploitation. Meanwhile Joseph, who struggles with and cannot fully acknowledge his love for Lucille, is faced with the choice of whether to free his daughter to protect her, even though it goes against everything he believes about the rightness of slavery.
As death looms from a yellow fever epidemic, Lucille and Joseph’s lives become interwoven through a chain of credit, sales, and promises with the lives of other inhabitants of the same Virginia town: the ruthless, profit-seeking planter Thomas Bailey, his morally-conflicted heir Adam, and the town’s new preacher Robert, secretly an abolitionist.
Of One Blood: Book Two of The American Inferno series
Lucille seeks to overcome her trauma from slavery with the aid of the abolitionist preacher Robert. When her path crosses with Adam, the son of the nearby wealthy planter Thomas Bailey, she is tempted by romantic desire even as she is forced to hide her past from him to protect her freedom.
Celia is inseparable from her twin sister Rosalind. After the twin sisters are sold away to a Virginia plantation, Celia finds herself falling in love with a young enslaved field worker, Gabriel. But when Gabriel’s father and enslaver Thomas Bailey tries to force Celia into an unequal bargain, the two lovers must make a choice between safety and freedom.
Short Fiction
A Pilgrimage of Ghosts
A young man seeks the truth of what happened to his sister after she disappears while trying to reach the United States from Guatemala. Meanwhile his sister, narrating from the afterlife, seeks to find her way back to the world of the living.
Maximum Entropy
A German chemist flees from potential arrest in the early years of the Nazi regime. As he travels by train to escape Gestapo agents, he reflects on the nature of time and his wife's death by suicide twenty years before.
Victims and Executioners
After he escapes from imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, Paul, a young physicist with Communist sympathies, seeks to wield his scientific knowledge to defeat the Nazi regime. But as he becomes involved in research for an atomic bomb, he has to confront the possibility of creating a weapon that goes against everything he believes.
Interested in my work?
I’m still seeking publication for my writings, but if you’re interested in any of these stories, get in touch with me via the Contact Me page. I’m willing to share my stories with you in exchange for your opinion as a reader!
If you’re interested in my thoughts on historical fiction, subscribe to my Craft of Historical Fiction Substack.