Writing

I’m a writer of fiction and poetry. My ideas tend to circulate around the notion of families, especially non-traditional, non-ideal families (which in truth is all of them). Family dynamics is always something that has interested me coming from a tight-knit and blended family. Personality and experience each person brings to a situation thus affecting how they perceive it is fascinating to me. Family history and genealogy is another area that I can’t resist. I think the stories that live in our histories can often explain and give meaning to the things that happen. They can also provide strength and courage for the things we have to face in our generations.

Novels

This Thing of Ours, A Novel

Liza has run twice in her twenty-four years. First from her childhood home in Sicily, after seeing her Mafioso father murder her mother and turn the gun on himself. Second, from the man her father arranged for her to marry. But now, in a new country with a loving husband that she chose and a baby on the way, her life is starting to resemble the American dream. Until her husband stumbles—accidentally at first and then with more gusto—down the all-too-familiar path of her father.

 Liza knows what being a Mafia wife entails, and she will not walk in her mother’s footsteps. She cannot stand by and watch them destroy everything she loves. No matter what it takes, her child will never know the same horrors she knew growing up.

This Thing of Ours is historical fiction set in St. Louis in the early 1920s about the experiences of an immigrant woman facing the challenges of being a new mother in a strange country all while fighting off the dark cloud that followed her from her homeland. It’s the story of my great-grandmother toeing the line of immorality to face off against one of the most frightening male-dominated factions the world has seen—and living to tell about it.

Short Stories & Poetry