About

I grew up in a world of intersections - partway first generation, with my dad uprooting his life to trek across ocean and land, from the Elbruz mountains to the plains of Oklahoma. My mama's roots went as deep in Oklahoma as my dad's can't, generations of farmers and preachers and doctors who fought and lived with the same flat, stubborn land.

Brown and white, established and outsider, Christian and Muslim, voyagers and homebodies, tradition and adaptation, Nowruz and Christmas - my family is a messy, beautiful example of paradox. Of how many complex, intricate ways there are to be human. 

As such, people and relationships have always fascinated me. I tend to write introspective fiction, and my debut novel is a fantasy romance. My goal, this 40th year of life, is to publish it.

Writing, though, has been a constant thread in my life. I've written articles, legislative policy briefs, trainings and toolkits, newsletters, blog posts, hundreds of pages of academic papers. Poetry, if you count what my seven-year-old self wrote in the 90's, and, in perhaps my proudest writing moment thus far, a play. A parody of Lysistrata - Lysistrata Revisited - that won an honorable mention at my college. I wasn't an English major, but the revered Dr. Alice Hines nudged me to submit it to the competition. 

Thank you, Dr. Hines. And Mrs. Foster (9th grade English), who handed me my first copy of Pride and Prejudice. And Mama, who told me to keep on writing.