My first novel, The Outlier, will be published by Random House Canada in 2024. It’s a psychological suspense story in which a wildly accomplished neuroscientist and entrepreneur — the only success story to emerge from an institution that treats psychopathic children — tries to find one other outlier from that facility in an attempt to understand the limits of her own nature.
My travel memoir, Wanderlust, spans 15 years of roaming the globe, taking readers on a wondrous ride from the South Pacific to the Middle East to the capitals of Europe and beyond. The New York Times Book Review called it “a heady, headlong chronical of a decade and a half spent adrift,” and Oprah.com said “her vivid tales…make the journey a vicarious pleasure.” I’m also the author of Bare, a non-fiction book about strippers that the Washington Post called “a first-rate, first-person work of social anthropology.” My travel writing has appeared in The Best American Travel Writing, among other anthologies, and won me three Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers.
I’m also a journalist, essayist, and editor. I’ve worked for Reuters, Forbes, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and my writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, the Guardian, and many other publications. I’ve taught writing at Seattle’s Hugo House and guest-lectured at New York University and elsewhere. Born and raised in Vancouver, I’ve lived in Cairo, London, Washington DC, and Paris, and I spent 10 years in New York City. I live in Cascadia.