I’ve never been alone, because I’ve always had a book. Characters are good company — they should leap off the page. I want you to remember my characters.

Fiction

My heart is in the novel. I’ve been writing original fiction since the seventh grade, when I realized that if I waited until I was a “good enough” writer to write a story, I’d be waiting forever. So I turned on the desktop and the rest is history.

My drug of choice is fantasy. I build immersive, expansive, nuanced secondary worlds driven by cutthroat people with competing agendas, willing to do whatever it takes to achieve those conflicting goals. I have a lot to say about being human (especially in today’s world) in the way my characters navigate love, belonging, responsibility, and conflict as the world shifts seismically around them.

What makes my work unique is the absence of a magic system. Is fantasy without magic still fantasy? You bet! I kept all the best elements of the genre and breathed new life into them — think the brutal, backstabbing scheming and breakneck sword fighting of Game of Thrones or Harrow the Ninth meets the tyranny of Mistborn and the intrigue of The Will of the Many in the broken world of Breath of the Wild. What will you do where’s no magic sword or dagger or inborn magical talent coming to save you, hero?

I like imagery. I like sharp dialogue. I want you to feel warm fuzzies when you read a celebration scene and I want you to feel like you’re being emotionally skinned when you read the gruesome ones.

A few of my favorite authors include, in no particular order, Tamsyn Muir (Gideon the Ninth, etc.), R. F. Kuang (The Poppy War, Babel), Gabriella Romero Lacruz (The Sun and the Void), Ursula K. LeGuin (The Dispossessed, the Earthsea cycle), Samantha Shannon (Priory of the Orange Tree), Naomi Novik (Spinning Silver, the Scholomance series), and James Islington (The Will of the Many). Other titles I adore include Brave New World (Huxley), Animal Farm (Orwell), and the works of Jack London and James Joyce.

I am increasingly interested in short stories, but I don’t have anything ready to share yet in that department.

Outside the world of the written word, I love the Legend of Zelda (Breath of the Wild and Twilight Princess are in the fabric of my soul) and Okami (if you cut open my brain, you’d see Shiranui). I learned how to play DnD from Critical Role and run a campaign for my fellow graduate students (our group is called PhDnD — get it?).

Nonfiction

In nonfiction I gravitate toward the scientific. Big surprise, right? Favorites in these categories include Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry (Robin Wall Kimmerer), Poverty by America (Matthew Desmond), and An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz). I think everyone should read these. One day I’ll write something about zoonotic disease.

If past lives exist, I’m pretty sure I was a saber-tooth cat at some point.