Once upon a time, there was a small, bespectacled girl of from a big African-American, Jamaican, and Panamanian family. She enjoyed listening to family stories, but more than anything else in the world, she loved to read books and write her own stories. So after high school, she left her small suburban New Jersey town to study writing in New York City. She wrote plays, poetry, and screenplays that sometimes made people cry.
Immediately after graduating from New York University with an MFA in Dramatic Writing, she joined the Big Apple Circus. After a year of traveling the east coast with clowns, elephants, and acrobats, left the circus and ran away to Hollywood.
Then she wrote, wrote and wrote and went to lots of meetings. She worked at Disney and small production companies. She even wrote for the Chicken Soup for the Soul tv series.
Eventually, she left the studios to help make the world a better place by teaching computer skills to veterans and other people struggling in the job market.
While teaching, she fell in love with writing new stories – novels, standup comedy routines, middle grade books, and picture books. Especially picture books.
So she learned everything she could about writing books for children and then she wrote some more. She took a lot of chances. She got a lot of rejections.
And then something wonderful happened. One editor said yes. And then some more yesses followed. Eventually she became a published children’s book author.
The bespectacled chick now lives in sunny Southern California with her handsome sweetheart, their purry ninja kitty named Sophie Grace, and their two betta fish named Jean-Michel Fisquiat and Frida Fishie Kahlo.