Creative Nonfiction

Birds are Stupid (Currently Querying)

Birds are Stupid is a societal self-help book feathered as lyrical, poignant, and often funny personal essays from a marine biologist turned educator. Birds are Stupid asks the reader to look away from the frilly distractions, like ostentatious birds, to examine our disrupted ecology and find ways to forge forward. This book immerses the reader in awe-inspiring encounters with tube worms, volvox, oysters, horseshoe crabs, bread mold, and other, lesser-appreciated organisms, to reteach the critical observing and questioning skills we need to build a better future for our society and our planet. It teaches how to frame questions and seek answers in a world where inquiry and observation are actively dissuaded.

The Science and the Story: A Narrative Craft Book For Scientists (in Progress)

This narrative craft book is for scientists and teaches storytelling as a means of countering science denialism. For scientists in the Trump era, our world is literally being disemboweled. Cuts to the NSF, NOAA, NIH, CDC, and EPA are gutting funding and jobs, eliminating productive lines of research, erasing databases of knowledge, and jeopardizing the future of the planet’s ecosystems and our health. Scientists need effective modes of science communication to not only humanize the field but also to show its worth to people’s everyday lives. This book breaks down creative writing craft elements to teach scientists how the power of narrative storytelling can be wielded to build public understanding and garner public support for science.

Science Fiction

Unity War (Currently Querying)

When Arttavia’s mother becomes the most recent victim of expansionist human colonists’ bid to conquer her world, Arttavia, a spirited nonhuman healer-in-training, must go against her species' conflict-averse traditions and battle the humans for her species’ survival.  Humans crash-landed on the cold, resource-strapped planet Tsutae eighty years ago. Initially, the native telepathic-telekinetic sentient species tried to forge a bi-species 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 to build their society. An uneasy truce between the two species persisted 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.