I ran out of ways to avoid becoming a writer.

I grew up the youngest of nine on a farm in rural Minnesota in a fundamentalist religion. TV, music, dancing, birth control, and questioning were considered sin. I left at 21 and eventually found my way to New York City, where I've spent the last two decades building a life that was unimaginable to the girl I used to be.

Along the way I became a personal trainer, a doula, an Emmy-nominated television personality, a graduate student, an editor, and a podcast producer — which turns out to be twenty-one years of the same job with fewer semicolons. All of it was listening.

I hold an MA in Biography and Memoir from the CUNY Graduate Center and a BA in English and Black Studies from City College, where I graduated summa cum laude while running a full-time business. I produce BIO Podcast for the Biographers International Organization, read first novels for the Center for Fiction, edit literary fiction, and write criticism on biography, memory, and place.

I'm finishing two books. One is an oral history of twenty-three women who left the religion I was raised in. The other is about the year I spent in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on the centennial of the Race Massacre, watching a city try to become something new while I was, too.

I still train women. All of the hats I wear come down to someone telling me what's happening, and me listening closely to what they're not saying.

I live in Jersey City with my husband, the novelist James Mondesir, and our dog named Frankie who came from Tulsa and has no interest in going back.