My favorite part of writing a book is the exploring: reading everything I can on a topic,  interviewing, sifting through photos and documents, and following ideas to discover where they lead.
My first out-of-college job was for a PBS television series called Smithsonian World.  The best part was the behind-the-scenes access to all of the Smithsonian museums. It felt like winning the lottery! I later worked on PBS shows like The American Experience, and indie films and TV. It was exciting to travel with film crews to locations around the world. I climbed up the rocky bluffs of Adak Island off the coast of Alaska as a scientist inspected bald eagle nests, and visited an archeological dig in a Prehistoric cave site in France. Best of all, I met and interviewed fascinating people: a Cold War Soviet bomb scientist, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, writers, artists, historians, Holocaust survivors, and ordinary people who witnessed extraordinary times.

After thirteen years in documentary film and TV, I returned to school to earn a master’s degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I was interested in making kids’ learning creative and meaningful. I started writing books for schools and libraries and also spent time tutoring and volunteering in schools. My nonfiction books for young adult readers, published by Lucent Books/Gale Cengage, tackle important, modern-day issues in a way that is clear, balanced, and easy to access.

These days, I also write middle grade and young adult biographies and histories. I time travel to the one-room schoolhouses of nineteenth century New England, or to an immigrant neighborhood in post-World War II Brooklyn, New York where my grandfather owned a little corner grocery. When I’m not writing, you’ll often find me in a school, reading with elementary students, or helping teen artists and writers to publish their creative work in an arts magazine called The Marble Collection. 

I’ve lived in San Diego, California, Providence, Rhode Island– where I attended Brown University and learned to like winter– Washington, D.C., and Boston, with a stop in Kiev, Ukraine along the way. Today, I  live with my family in Lexington, Massachusetts, a town steeped in American history.  We’re never surprised to see a Minuteman, a Red Coat, or even Paul Revere walking down the street.