About
NO LIMITS. NO FEAR.
It’s been a helluva ride. Here I sit with a debut novel under my belt and what strikes me is that you never know what’s waiting around the corner. It comes down to this.
Necessity may well be the mother of invention but when it comes to re-invention, naïve optimism has it beat, hands down.
I’ve written all my life. It’s a compulsion. I suspect most writers would say the same. But it wasn’t until 2019 that an idea for a novel took over my days and nights. I opened this Pandora’s box after a devastating fire and complicated family relationship had me fashioning a horror story based on events that were too painful to process. And so it goes.
Since then, my short stories have found a home in various anthologies and literary magazines, and my debut novel, DEENA UNDONE, has won multiple awards, most notably an American Fiction Award, a Storytrade Book Award, and a Page Turner Award. Added to all this is my newest endeavor – bringing short stories and novel excerpts onto the stage accompanied by live jazz. The maiden voyage for this project occurred in May of 2025 with a group called The Chrysalis. Not bad for an old broad.
Which brings me to re-invention. Yes, I’ve always written, but while doing so, I focused on other things. My career in opera was kicked off by a debut at the Royal Opera in Stockholm along with a Carnegie Recital Hall debut in New York. Before that I headed up a fixed income department at a major investment advisory firm. Then there was my café in upstate New York that landed on several “best of” lists and led to a SOFI award – the Oscars of the specialty food business. I suspect my father’s rallying cry of “How hard could it be?” was behind it all. Then again, he’d never tried writing.
I live in a two-hundred-year old farmhouse in upstate New York with my extraordinary husband and quirky cattle dog, Bad Dog Bob where we are regularly visited by a cadre of loud friends and two equally extraordinary grown sons.
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