About me

I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and lived in New York City with my mother and grandmother, an editor at Harcourt Brace and former literary editor of The Nation, until I was four. Not surprisingly, my earliest dream was to be an editor like my grandmother, or failing that, a writer or a librarian. I was okay with whatever it was, as long as books played a central part.

Somewhere along the way life took me on a detour and I ended up majoring in Latin American Studies and Spanish in college and grad school and moving to Puebla, Mexico, where I lived for twenty years (hence the Mexican themes of my first two novels). When my kids went off to school, I began to write, starting out with short stories. My first book-length project was a young-adult novel titled The Ring of Leilani. This was followed by The Curse of the Jade Amulet, completed after I moved back to the U.S. Both books are available on Amazon, as is my vacation memoir, 27 Scoops of Gelato, and my latest young-adult novel, set in the Pacific Northwest and titled The Portal and the Stone. Find out more about my books here.

In addition to writing my own books, I’ve done literally hundreds of literary, academic and commercial translations from Spanish and Italian to English during the last twenty-five years. I also taught English and Spanish grammar, composition, conversation, and phonetics at various universities in Mexico and the U.S. for over fifteen years. While living in Mexico, I did freelance editing work for MacMillan Heinemann ELT and Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

These days I live the beautiful city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I focus exclusively on literary editing and translating. When I’m not working, you can find me hiking, doing yoga, reading, or cooking.