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 Scientist and the Story: A Narrative Craft Book For STEM Professionals (Currently Querying)

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

Helio Landing (Currently Querying)

Captain Christopher Paul (CP) Montgomery is so desperate to get his family off the roasting, pollution-drenched Earth that he exchanged his military commission for a job captaining corporate Mars shuttles in the hopes of eventually securing a crew position and passage for his family on a colony ship headed to a pristine world. When the offer of the third shift captain position on the long-haul colony ship Helio comes while his son is sick in the hospital, CP accepts. 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. Will CP be able to hold the Helio and her crew together long enough to land on their colony world, or are the dangers both inside and outside his ship too great for any person to overcome?

Unity War (In Progress)

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.