about

Born to immigrant parents in New Jersey in the late 80s, I majored in English and minored in French at Rutgers University. After receiving my Bachelor’s degree, I moved to France to teach English in a few elementary schools in the Parisian suburbs, nanny for three little boys, and sling fresh juice and sliced bread at Rose Bakery.

When I returned to the US, I managed the Kids Department at Barnes & Noble, but knew I needed to either find another teaching job or leave the country again - this time, ideally, to work on a farm someplace warm. But the New York City Teaching Fellows offered me a position before WWOOF did, so I relocated to New York and began my career in education, teaching English Language Arts, Social Studies, and French at The Young Women’s Leadership School in Brooklyn. My evenings belonged to Brooklyn College, where I was pursuing a Masters of Science in Secondary Education at the same time, learning how to teach students with learning disabilities. In addition to classroom teaching, curriculum development, and writing endless IEPs, I was Musical Director of a middle school production, Dear Edwina and worked with a teaching artist from The Moth to establish a high school storytelling club.

Around this time, I began freelance writing, establishing connections and pursuing opportunities in beloved publications like The Toast (RIP), The Establishment (RIP), Lit Hub, and McSweeney’s. I attended writing workshops at Catapult and went on to report and contribute regularly for The Cut and New York Times, as well as Guernica, Nylon, Refinery29, Romper, Real Simple, Parents Magazine, and other publications. I spent some time working with the Well-Read Black Girl book club, assisting with events, writing book reviews, and helping to plan and execute the first few in-person festivals, and contributed an essay to the 2018 anthology Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves.

After a few years in education - and becoming a mother - I needed a career change, and decided to get closer to my first love: books. I learned the art of book publicity at Riverhead Books (where I worked with authors like Brit Bennett, Danzy Senna, Casey Gerald, Olga Tokarczuk, and more); shifted to independent publishing at Algonquin (Ross Gay, Mathangi Subramanian, Don Kulick); and spent some time at Catapult, Counterpoint, and Soft Skull Press (Zaina Arafat, Francois S. Clemmons, and Jamie Figueroa, among others).

In 2020, I returned to Penguin Random House, where I am now Publicity Director at One World and Roc Lit 101. I have the honor of helping to publish authors like Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project), Danyel Smith (Shine Bright), Gabriel Dozal (The Border Simulator), Morgan Parker (You Get What You Pay For), Donovan X. Ramsey (When Crack Was King), Maurice Carlos Ruffin (The American Daughters), and many, many more luminaries who are transforming culture and the ways we think about justice, future possibilities, and art - from perspectives and walks of life that traditional publishing has long undervalued.

Now based in Southern California, I am a board member of Baldwin for the Arts, a member of the Los Angeles NAACP, and serve as a Read Ahead mentor. Whether it be through my own writing, my publicity strategizing, political advocacy, or consulting work, I aim to both create and illuminate essential storytelling and poetry that interrogate the truth of humanity: our triumphs, our ambitions, our pursuit of beauty and truth, and the myriad ways that we fall short, and try again.

And I am still dreaming of that farm.