Fiction
I’m excited to share my speculative flash fiction piece “Her Heart’s Desire,” published in the Fall 2022 issue of IWWG’s Network (p. 25).
Hilary Dolan didn’t quite have everything she wanted, but she knew how to get it. But everything she got wasn’t what she bargained for.
Enjoy reading it here.
Crimson Fox
Chapters now live on my blog!
(Search key term Crimson Fox)
Gloria Carlisle filled every article she wrote for Anthem magazine with her penchant for classic rock and her passion for storytelling. When her editor assigns her an interview with the lead singer of the country’s number one rock band, it’s Gloria’s chance to establish herself as a Black female writer in a white man’s world of rock journalism.
When the singer cancels the interview and refuses to reschedule it, Gloria must return to L.A. to face her editor with no story.
After hours on the road, Gloria finds herself at the Silver Cactus, a small bar and grill in the middle of the desert, owned by the former bass guitarist of the all-female rock band Crimson Fox. That pitstop leads to a journey across the country and back to the desert in search of the story that was never told—the story Gloria was meant to write, and the one that will show her who she was always meant to be.
Evangeline’s Kiss
(a work in progress)
Evangeline Laurent was destined to be an artist from the time her mother found her clutching a handful of extraordinary violets in the garden of their summer home in the South of France.
But the powerful tea that comes from them has a twist for her. When young Evangeline marries Bernie Stein in Paris in 1964, he takes her back to San Francisco with the promise that someday his record shop will be her art studio.
The heartbreak of tragedy obliterates that dream for Evangeline, but not before she plants a kiss on the forehead of a child who frequents the record store with her mother.
Years later, Nikki Ford finds herself living in a glorious top floor apartment on New York’s Central Park West, with a wall of windows giving the perfect natural light for an artist to paint.
Except Nikki is working as an architect instead of an artist. And her husband’s all-consuming work as an attorney means that he’s barely home to enjoy it with her. She’s perfectly unhappy in her “perfect” life.
Until one morning when she finds a package that her husband left on the desk for her to open. Inside is a letter, and a mysterious key, from another attorney from back home in San Francisco. Bernie Stein—the “Music Man” who bought her cookies whenever her mother went to buy records—has died and left his music store to her.
Nikki must decide whether or not to return home for an inheritance that she’s in no way qualified to accept. And it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with her buried desire to be an artist…or does it?
Nonfiction
Porter: A Wolf Dog and His People
Second Edition
On a cold day just before Christmas in 2013, the owner of a wolf dog named Porter, who had kept the animal on a 30-foot chain for the entirety of the short six years of his life, had decided to move away. He was done with his life there and done with Porter. When no home could be found for him, he called a mobile vet to come out and end his life.
Fortunately for Porter, and his new family, and all who came to love him since then, that vet refused to end his life.
After much love, proper care, and special training, Porter enjoyed his life off the chain. This is the story of all that he overcame, the people he chose to be in his pack, and his legacy of love, The Red Riding Hood Rescue Project (all proceeds of this book go to RRHRP)
Cover art by Annette Hassell
Cover design by Beezley Art and Design
Available on Amazon
The Insanity of Color: A Memoir in the Shade of Me
(a work in progress)
As a child, I held an array of crayons against my skin trying to understand how I could be Black…
My kindergarten art teacher gave me a paint color called “flesh” with which to paint my skin brown for a self portrait…
For years, Malibu Barbie was my standard of beauty…
In high school, a fellow student, a Black boy who was on the football team, threatened to beat me for talking “too white” and failing to say “nigger” aloud to him…
My journey as a light-skinned Black woman has been a telling one, and one that I still don’t see represented in American media and entertainment. For these reasons, I want to tell my own story, in my own way—in the shade of me.