Bio

I am an author and psychotherapist specializing in depression, complex trauma and racial identity. I am also a former ballet dancer, with essays published in Longreads, Narrative.ly, Mamalode, The Common, and fiction in Literary Mama and The Piltdown Review, where I was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
A born-and-raised New Yorker, I now live in Montclair, New Jersey with my husband and dog. I am the mother of two college students.

I graduated from Princeton University, got my Masters from Hunter College School of Social Work, and my post-masters certification in family therapy from the Ackerman Institute. Before becoming a therapist, I was a ballet dancer with the Pennsylvania and Pacific Northwest Ballet Companies.

All my life, I have been writing – essays and attempts at novels–becoming published for the first time in 1998, when Social Work In Healthcare accepted one of my graduate school papers. Several years later, I published a talk I did at a Synagogue on Multiracial Jewish Identity.

I am Black, biracial (African American and Ashkenazi Jewish), the only child of my parents’ very happy interracial marriage. It was a progressive, yet surprisingly traditional home, where my parents created a joint cultural environment where race and politics were part of the family dialogue.

As a Black Jew – a ballerina turned shrink – a recovered anorexic and bulimic responsible for feeding her family – dual identity is part of my life and central to my writing.