About me

Hi! I grew up in Michigan and Ohio, and have lived, worked, and traveled abroad, including the UK, Hungary, and Belgium. Growing up, I was shy, the youngest of three step siblings, but had a secret life as a pre-professional competitive artistic roller skater, and spent a lot of my free time world-building and making up songs on the piano. I graduated from Oberlin College in 2013 with a BA in Anthropology, with a Concentration in Peace and Conflict Studies, and a minor in English. I currently study performance, public speaking, and risk-taking at THE STUDIO, while making a living as an author and speaking at universities across the country. My first fictional YA novel will come out in 2020 with Dial Books for Young Readers at Penguin Random House.

I started working with children when I was a child myself. At the age of 12, I began co-leading skating classes for beginners, quickly learning patience and the ability to explain complex tasks in simple language. Once I entered high school, I started babysitting for family friends. Through college, I worked at three political asylums in Austin, Detroit, and Rixensart, Belgium, where I made a piñata for a 10 year old Russian, befriended a Chechen teenager by sending each other drawings, and did homework with a table of Ghanan girls. Upon graduating, I took on more teaching roles, tutoring elementary kids one-on-one in math and facilitating at a visual arts day camp in Oberlin, and leading story telling workshop for middle school girls in Cincinnati. This naturally led me back to babysitting, both as a date night sitter and long term sitter, here in New York City and in Budapest. Some of my favorite memories is practicing my basic Hungarian with a 4 year old before bedtime, going to the MET with a 5 year old trans girl, sharing a 12 year old's fan art with an author who is an acquaintance of mine, and making up stories about the Halloween decorations with a 7 year old.

Children and teens are incredibly intelligent, emotional, resilient, and very much the future. I look forward to a lifetime of living from them.