Creative Nonfiction

THE SCIENTIST AND THE STORY: A Narrative Craft Book for STEM Professionals (forthcoming from University of California Press)

Scientist first not science first.

This book is an audience-specific narrative-craft book, in which I argue that one of the most effective ways increase the public interest, appreciation, and engagement with science is through personal storytelling. We need to step away from our podiums and PowerPoint projections of trend lines and tell our science stories better in language and formats that connect with our audience, draw them into our experiences, and help them understand not only our data but our humanity. To do this, we need to allow ourselves, the scientists, to become the protagonists of our own narratives. Pulling lessons from memoir-style storytelling, we need to be willing to talk about our reasons for devoting years of our lives to asking “why” and connect with people on a human, emotional, and vulnerable level before beginning to discuss our results and findings. In this book, I provide rationale, examples, and a how-to guide for using personal storytelling as a novel approach to science communication.

BIRDS ARE STUPID (Currently Querying)

BIRDS ARE STUPID calls on us to look to the tubeworms and mud to relearn the importance of critical thinking.

During a distracted era, where everyone seems obsessed with glitz like charismatic birds, I, a marine biologist turned educator, examine my experience with our imperiled planet’s lesser-known organisms: from my first encounter with a hermit crab in a Hawaiian tide pool at five, to finding baby fish in the rice of a housewarming present when we moved to Japan in seventh grade, to studying horseshoe crabs at the now politically mutilated New College of Florida, to examining tubeworms for my Ph.D. at Stanford. BIRDS ARE STUPIDpulls us away from the flashy feathers of distraction and examines the tent caterpillars and the coral reef rubble to find the powerful lessons our gutted planet can teach us about being better humans. BIRDS ARE STUPID is a collection of witty, lyrical, personal essays about the importance of being awed and asking questions. My book is similar to The Last America Road Trip by Sarah Kendzior and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer in that it confronts our destructive capacity head-on, calls it out, and offers a path to a better future. In a society where we are discouraged from looking, listening, and questioning, this book, like Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Starry Messenger, teaches how observation and questioning from a new perspective, enables us to love and repair our society and our world.

Science Fiction

HELIO LANDING (Currently Querying)

A desperate spaceship captain and his motley crew must fight corporate espionage, solve murders, and repair their wounded ship to save their cryofrozen colonist cargo. 

Christopher Paul (CP) Montgomery is so frantic to get his family off the roasting, pollution-drenched Earth that he accepts an offer to be third shift captain on the long-haul colony spaceship Helio. Now he faces seven lonely years shepherding the Helio to a new world while his family and the rest of the colonists sleep away the trip in cryofreeze. When CP is awoken for his shift seven years early, he faces the Helio falling apart, no other captains to help, failing cryopods, murder, corporate espionage threatening the colony, and infighting among his six crew members. After the poorly built shield fails and the ship is damaged by meteoroids, CP must hold the Helio and his crew together long enough to land on their colony world, before their dwindling fuel and air reserves run out and they all die. HELIO LANDING is a character-driven space adventure, combining the engineering challenges of Andy Weir’s The Martian, the mismatched big-personality crew of Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Final Architecture series, and the fast-paced corporate intrigue of Ken Liu’s All That We See or Seem.

UNITY WAR (Currently Querying)

To save her conflict-adverse people from genocide, a spirited nonhuman healer-in-training, must wag war against agresive humans colonist. 

Humans crashlanded on the cold, resource-strapped planet Tsutae eighty years ago. Initially, the native telepathic-telekinetic sentient species tried to forge a bispecies society with the new arrivals, only to have their efforts fail. Admitting defeat, the native Tsutaens retreated into the icy northern latitudes, leaving the warmer equatorial regions for the humans. An uneasy truce between the two species persisted only because the Tsutaen government's response to human encroachment was to concede resources and retreat. But there is a new human governor, one promoting human-first policies, and Arttavia’s mother is only the first casualty in a calculated effort to take control of the entire planet. Driven by grief and opaque visions of the future, Arttavia must drag her reluctant people into a UNITY WAR against the humans’ superior firepower or risk annihilation. UNITY WAR, is a mind against machine, anti-colonialist epic, where Arttavia must teach her technologically primitive species to use their unique mental abilities to battle human greed. Arttavia must risk everything dear to her, including her future, her integrity, her lover, and her life, to save her species.