Author. Artist.
Fishbird. Unicorn

I make work for children, adults and once unicorns.

I write about loss, everyday grief and unexpected mourning.

I write about wonder.

Your being here is pretty wonderful.

Here goes. A dusting of projects.

  1. ReachYou received a Transformative Public Art Grant from the City of Boston after our time in Kazakhstan working with space nomads at the GoViral Festival! We love sharing transmissions from the future with new Archivists and hope that we can ReachYou.
  2. I've loved sharing The Sound of Silence and honored to be on NPR's Books of the Year List,
    People Magazine's 12 Best Books of the Year, and Brainpickings' Best Children's Books of the Year
  3. Writing about mourning and my sister, I spent three amazing weeks at Hedgebrook and the work in progress was also finalist for the Sustainable Arts Foundation Award!
  4. Deep in two National Geographic anthologies you can find stories of my journeys around Japan. Or if you prefer a small town in Nicaragua, find me in The Christian Science Monitor.
  5. With Beau Kenyon and Julia Kuo we made fantastical new sounds here, We Doki Doki.
  6. I circle around a lot of the same themes. I loved presenting at Mixed Remixed. For Boston's NPR (at 43:15), I explored multiracial identity and kikokushijo for The Japan Times
  7. If you like time machines, here's a list of more things I've written.

You can always write me. On instagram.

And.

  1. About those unicorns I mentioned. They write letters with questions about human life.
  2. And those fishbirds are living everywhere
  3. Also, silence-loving librarians tell us their favorite sounds
  4. And yes, you heard me mention that other thing, I write things and make things about death.
  5. In between naps and feedings, about creativity as a parent, and occasionally, when frustrated, about writing.

I keep making new things. This world is so full of things.

Visits & Teaching

I teach on mindfulness, empathy, writing, and silence, and I can't wait to share THE SOUND OF SILENCE with you at your school. I've taught writing for The Writing Faculty, Kikokushijo Academy and at The Kingsley Montessori School. I was thrilled to develop and teach a class on empathy at 826 Boston for MIT's The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values and WGBH Boston.

This is a randomizer. With each refresh, view past lives of mine.

  1. I worked as an on-camera TV reporter for NHK-World in Tokyo
  2. Once, I was a cryptozoologist and storyteller at the Bigfoot Research Institute
  3. I was an editor at the Drum Literary Magazine.
  4. Dame Judi Dench never met me, but still, she was my patron at The London Academy of Theater where I studied.
  5. We traveled for two years in our intergenerational caravan, youngest member 6 months, oldest member 73 years old. We lived for months at a time in Morocco, New Zealand, Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic, and Colombia.
  6. I live in a beautiful mountain town in Colombia with five chickens and five other humans.
  7. For a year and a half I danced in Megan Metcalf's 29 Friends.
  8. For Tokyo Art Beat I was once an editor.
  9. I was an Earhart Fellow in Journalism and Sociology at Boston University
  10. I collected oral histories of multiracial people for the Brooklyn Historical Society
  11. I was a Yellow Arrow Archer
  12. I played Fuego in Breath, Boom by the amazing Kia Corthron, directed by Michael Garces at the Huntington Theater
  13. I am a founding board member of Union Docs in Brooklyn
  14. I was in the original cast of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind in New York.
  15. I'm a graduate of the National Theater Institute, Fall '99
  16. I once gave out panini samples. For work. But mostly gave entire platters to homeless people. And nearly got fired.
  17. As a teenager I liked my parents. Like I would whisper I'm not here. when friends called so I could hang out at home. Taurus.
  18. My novel in progress has unicorns and strange mourning rituals and So.Much.Tokyo.
  19. To date I've created 6 of my own mourning rituals.
  20. Salon Make is an awesome day long group art making project that you should be involved in. Write me.

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