About
I am an author and illustrator from Colorado and I have been fascinated with disaster stories for as long as I can remember. In middle school I was once given an assignment to write a short story on any topic I wanted, so I wrote about a tornado hitting our school and trapping all the students in the gym (but somehow none of the teachers, of course). When it came time to critique the stories, my teacher was rather flummoxed about what to do with me, because no one else in class had written anything remotely similar so she didn’t know who to pair me up with. It didn’t matter, though, because I was hooked. I very distinctly remember later going home and standing in my garage and thinking that I wanted to grow up to be an author that wrote disaster books and that I was going to write one book for each type of disaster. So far, I’ve written two wildfire books and a nuclear disaster book (and a fantasy-adjacent book set several centuries after a vampiric plague). Next up, volcanoes! (And probably another wildfire book or two because, as a Colorado girl, wildfires will always be something I come back to.)
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In 2020, when Colorado and much of the United States experienced one of the worst fire years on record, I took that love of disaster media to the next step and started providing social media coverage on the various fires. I grew even more fascinated with how people tell stories of disaster, both fictional and real, and the ways modern forms of media play into those tellings.
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By 2023, unhappy in my previous job, I made a decision on a whim to go back to school for a two-year degree in Wildland Fire Management at Colorado Mesa University, with an additional certificate in Emergency Management taught by Elliot Jennings, the former Emergency Manager of Galveston, Texas. I instantly fell in love with learning everything I could about Emergency Management, digging deeper and deeper into research on the sociological aspects of disasters. I am now considering pursuing a PhD in sociology and/or emergency management, but even if I don’t go that route, I will continue to pursue my interest in disasters and disaster media, and share it on this website.