About

“Literature is life. It’s about people and their experiences in different times and places.” These words hung colorfully on the wall of a high school English classroom for over a decade. They epitomize my life experiences that I now share with the global community through writing.

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For over two decades, I have taught both academic and spiritual classes to adolescents and adults on 20th and 21st century literature, race, religion, film, politics, pop culture, urban environmental consciousness and international travel. I have mentored young adults globally, educators, yogis, pastors, missionaries, religious leaders, writers and achieved a cultural cohesion of at risk teenagers. I've worked for hospitals, a law university and a private hedge fund company. I was editor and one of the writers for the former Bay Area magazine “Foresight.” As a student at University of San Francisco’s College for Women—Lone Mountain, I majored in French and International Studies which led to study in Paris, France as an exchange student but instead proved to be an education in homelessness. 

My husband, Rahim and I have hiked the Grand Canyon 360, climbed the Great Wall of China, hiked to the Tibetan Basecamp of Qomolangma—Mount Everest, the Jebel Musa (Mountain of Moses) of Sinai, Egypt, the Golan Heights of Israel, the Pontus Mountains of Turkey, the Chin Hills of Myanmar and lived and worked with the Hopi Tribe in Kykotsmovi Village, Hopi, Arizona, and among the Tigray in Axum, Ethiopia. This life has been filled with deliberate choices to experience and embrace the world’s people, places and cultures to gather together the data that would culminate in the end product of a potential 3-book series starting with the YA novel, UniversCity.

The team attended a Stanford Publishing Course and encouraged me to self-publish O.T.1 The Original Transformer, a children’s book trilogy written to capture the amazing metamorphosis of the endangered monarch butterfly. It was written for children of all ages in all places and situations, foster and adoption, at-risk children iin particular. 

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In 2021, I picked back up and completed UniversCity, the first of the  3 book series.  It's been a work decades in the idea and formulating process. It's about a GenZ hip-hop, visionary beauty with brains that’s quiet about her secrets but loud about her POV, her point of view.  Mission Omega Shepherd had just turned 18 and was thrilled to start her first quarter as a Freshwoman at Stanford University.  The thrill was soon gone as that quarter became the quarter from hell. Then the 2020 planet plague came which turned her dream of a wannabe doctor into that of a supernatural attorney to defend the planet now on trial with a guilty, but transformative verdict. 

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M. O. S. has no issues with self-esteem, but sees her value interwoven with those she knows and meets. She is the nerd, bold fire girl you love to know, but have never met before. Although unaware, she’s what many girls wanna be and what boys think they like until they meet the "real" Mission, causing readers to be hip-notically turning the pages until the end is in sight. Then, anxiously looking for the next book knowing that it wasn't all done in the first. 
 

UniversCity demonstrates and sees beyond the appearance of people and things. The characters fit and are people you know and that you want to get to know deeper and better. The novel tells us about our human aspirations and allows debate to permeate all assumptions through the dialogue and actions of characters. There is no cheating here, fast endings or sudden elevations, no magic or sci-fi needed. 

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Finally, “At the heart of my soul is the life tag: #writer/authorliving because I write. I have survived and am blessed to still be living with an open heart, a sane and sober mind and a saved soul. I'm very grateful for the now fierce  resolve and purpose to do the destined thing: Get UniversCity with its sequel books into infinite readers hands encircling the world. “But first, must get a literary agent who gets it and a publisher who fights for it. As my cultural anthropology professor insisted, "Your writing will change the world." 

 

I live now in Tulsa, Oklahoma with husband Rahim and bonus daughter, Phoenix Dode, who are essential to this entire writing process.  ”