I'm a creative nonfiction writer who teaches and publishes travel writing, memoir, and essays with cultural/social/spiritual themes. If you don't mind irony and a potty-mouth, I'm available for lectures, readings, film screenings/discussions and workshops!
In the summers I teaching Travel Writing, Food Writing, and Nonfiction Structure & Form at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival My Iowa Summer Writing Festival Page. I also teach Memoir for Writers of Color at the amazing Voices of Our Nations (VONA) in San Francisco and Memoir for Writers of African Descent at the Hurston/Wright Writers' Week Workshop in Washington, DC
Meeting Faith (W.W. Norton), my memoir about flunking out of Harvard, moving to Thailand, and becoming the first black Buddhist nun, won the PEN Beyond Margins Award for the Best Biography/Memoir of 2004. The Meeting Faith Website
I am author/narrator/subject of My Journey Home, a 35-minute PBS documentary based on my life growing up in the Pacific Northwest with a Nordic-American mother and then traveling to Nigeria as an adult to meet the father I never knew and the siblings I wasn't sure existed. PBS's site for My Journey Home
I am also co-author (with 3 of my closest friends) of a trashy multicultural thriller about Ivy League prostitution called The Student Body (Villard Books/Random House), written under the penname Jane Harvard. The Student Body Website
My latest project, Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology (The New Press), is collection of international coming of age stories that I co-edited. O Magazine raved, “This timely anthology is a step towards wholeness in a broken world.” Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology
