Hello!

I’m an award-winning journalist, writer, and multilingual translator, and a multilingual editor with a curiosity that rarely stays in one lane. After several years in the newsroom at The Santa Fe New Mexican — the oldest newspaper in the American West — I’ve returned to independent journalism to pursue the stories I believe most urgently need telling, including investigations into gender-based violence in Mexico and the United States. I take on freelance and investigative assignments across a wide range of subjects and am always on the lookout for stories that matter, voices that deserve to be heard, and fresh ways to make people pay attention.

My reporting and writing roam widely: from nuclear culture, photography, and the arts to Native American affairs, environmental justice, gender-based violence and gender justice; from hiking, the great outdoors, food culture, and public spaces to conservation, politics, ethnic diasporas, identity, exile and asylum, languages, poverty, homelessness, immigration, and animal rights. In short, if a subject touches human lives, power, culture, or the world we share, you bet that I’m interested.

I’ve written profiles, long-form obituaries, features, news stories, reviews, personal and reporter essays, and editorials—not to mention stories about writing stories and articles about writing articles. I’ve also photographed many of my own pieces, moderated panels at festivals and special events, led workshops, lectured on craft, and taken part in public readings. I like working across forms and formats, and I’m happy to follow a good story wherever it leads.

My academic background is as eclectic as my reporting interests. I hold a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and Latin, a second bachelor’s in language acquisition, a research master’s in sociolinguistics and linguistic human rights in colonial and postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa, an MA and an MFA in creative and narrative writing, and a graduate certificate in editing. I’ve also completed graduate coursework in a broad range of subjects related to news and long-form narrative journalism. Words, in all their forms, have been a lifelong preoccupation.

I’ve lived in 11 countries — France, Canada, Poland, Mexico, India, England, Italy, Zambia, Hungary, Hong Kong, and the United States — and traveled to more than 70 others. I’m a former child refugee and a forever immigrant, and I’ve experienced authoritarian rule, poverty, discrimination, exile, and human despair in more places and forms than I ever would have wished. But I’ve also learned something far more enduring: the extraordinary kindness of strangers.

I’m fluent and at native level in French (metropolitan French and Québecois), Spanish, Polish, and English; speak intermediate Italian; and can get by, to varying degrees, in several other Indo-European languages, including Croatian, Czech, and some German. I also understand Portuguese and Cajun French, and Haitian Créole (Kreyòl Ayisyen) to a lesser degree. Moving constantly between languages and cultures has shaped not only how I communicate, but also how I listen, observe, meet others where they are, understand the world, and tell stories. 

I am a citizen of the European Union, Canada, and the United States, am currently based in the high desert of New Mexico, and travel abroad regularly on assignment. 

At the heart of it all is a simple conviction: the world is full of stories worth telling, and stories are empathy machines. I’m here to find these stories, do them justice, and share them with the world.​​

​