A closer look at me, my writing style, and the themes I can’t seem to stop circling. From grief and obsession to restaurants, memory, and messy human connection, these are the questions and worlds that shape my work.

about me

Where are you based, and how does where you live influence your writing?

I’m based in Brooklyn, New York, and most of my work takes place in New York City. Almost every project I’m working on, except Across Hollowbone Ridge, lives here in some way. New York feels like a whole world inside one city, which gives me endless possibilities for what my characters can do, where they can go, and who they can become tangled with.
At the same time, I grew up in Upstate New York and spent a year living in a town with a population of around 300, so I’m also drawn to suburbia, rural spaces, and small-town lore. I like the contrast between crowded city intimacy and the kind of town where everyone knows something, but no one says it directly.
New York also influences my writing through culture, food, language, and community. Latino culture, especially Dominican culture, often finds its way into my work through friendships, families, restaurants, music, and the everyday warmth and complexity of neighborhood life.

What do you do when you’re not writing?

When I’m not writing, I’m usually working. I have a full-time job in healthcare, and sometimes I work six days a week. It’s rewarding, but it has changed the way I write. I do not have the same open mornings and afternoons I had when I worked in restaurants, so I’ve had to learn how to fit writing into a much busier life.
Outside of work, I spend a lot of time with my dog and cat. Most of my closest friends are long-distance, so I’m often on the phone with them while cleaning, organizing, or scrubbing something. I’m also a big knitter, which has made its way into both As We Are and Across Hollowbone Ridge.
I tend to keep to myself and do not go out very often, so my free time is usually quiet: pets, phone calls, knitting, cleaning, and whatever story is currently taking over my brain.

What do you hope people feel when they read your work?

I want reading my work to feel immersive, almost like a full-body experience. I want readers to feel like they are inside the world with the characters: sitting beside them, fighting with them, rooting for them, furious with them, and cringing when they make the wrong choice.
I love when a book makes me feel betrayed by fictional people, because it means I cared enough to forget they were fictional for a while. That is the kind of reaction I want from readers. I want the relationships to feel real enough that the heartbreak lands in the body, not just the mind.
More than anything, I want readers to feel less alone. I want them to recognize something private in the work: a feeling they have not known how to explain, a mistake they have made, a hope they kept too long, or a wound they thought only belonged to them.

What might surprise readers about you as a writer?

What might surprise readers is how much research I do for stories that are ultimately very character-driven. I love emotional mess, but I also want the worlds around that mess to feel accurate, lived-in, and specific.
When I’m working on a book, I often interview people who know more than I do. For As We Are, I spoke with a bar owner who had recently opened a place on the Upper West Side, and he walked me through real opening costs and numbers. I’ve interviewed bodega owners, asked bartenders to look at drink recipes, and built Joseph’s actual Brisa spreadsheet so I could understand what the bar might need financially.
For As I Was, I spoke with mandated reporters and teachers to better understand how certain situations involving a child might realistically unfold. For Across Hollowbone Ridge, I talked to someone with hunting experience and even bought a fishing reel so I could figure out how it worked.
I like doing enough research that the fictional world has a skeleton under it. Even if the story is about grief, obsession, friendship, or survival, the details still matter. They make the characters’ lives feel real enough to touch.

about the process

What does your writing process look like?

Honestly, my process is messy. I rarely outline from the beginning. Usually, I start by writing whatever scene is loudest in my head, even if it belongs much later in the book. I might write Chapter 17, then Chapter 2, then Chapter 45, and eventually the connective tissue starts to appear.
Once I have a large enough chunk of the story, I begin organizing it more seriously. I usually do not outline until I already have a strong sense of the characters and the direction I’m going in. The structure often comes after the voice.
I write exclusively in Scrivener, which helps my scattered brain stay functional. I use it to label scenes, duplicate drafts, move sections around, and keep track of the chaos as it becomes a book. I admire writers who can draft neatly in notebooks, Google Docs, or Word, but I need a system that lets the mess exist while I slowly figure out what shape it wants to take.

How do you build your characters?

I usually start with inspiration, then physical characteristics, then habits, tics, and mannerisms. Dax in As We Are is always reaching for hand sanitizer. Melissa, in both As We Are and As I Was, calls people “honey.” Those details may seem small at first, but once I know what a character does, I start asking why they do it.
From there, I build backward. What happened to them as a child? What is their family like? What are they hesitant about? What do they avoid? What do they repeat without realizing it? Once I have those pieces, I usually start writing and let the character reveal more as I go.
I think everyone has small habits that began somewhere. We all have secrets that leak out in reactions, routines, defenses, and the way we respond to ordinary things. A character starts to feel real to me when those little details connect to something deeper.

What role does music play in your writing process?

I actually rarely listen to music while I’m drafting. Most of the time, I write in complete silence because music can distract me when I’m trying to hear the characters clearly. But music still plays a big role in how I understand a project.
I’ll often hear a song later and immediately connect it to a scene, a character, or the atmosphere of a book. That’s usually how my playlists happen: not because I’m listening while I write every day, but because certain songs start attaching themselves to the story.
The exception is when I’m doing what I call a writing sprint, usually when I’m close to finishing a draft. I clean my whole apartment first, put my phone away, avoid distractions, and focus until I get through it. That is when I’ll usually listen to music, because by then I know the world well enough that the music helps push me through instead of pulling me away.
A few of my book playlists are available here.

How do you build and organize the worlds of your books?

World-building depends on the book, but Across Hollowbone Ridge has been especially fun because Black Bear is fictional. That meant creating the entire town: the parks, creeks, rivers, mountains, bars, local landmarks, old-timers, problem people, younger residents, town gossip, folklore, and nicknames.
That kind of world-building is satisfying because it forces me to think beyond the main characters. I have to know who works where, who remembers what, who has lived there forever, which places feel safe, which places feel haunted, and what stories a town tells about itself.
Organizationally, I save everything I write. My drafts can get enormous because I keep everything: old versions, cut scenes, experiments, and alternate paths. It might sound chaotic, but saving everything helps me. Sometimes a scene is not right for the current version, but there is still something alive in it: a line, a beat, or a character moment I may need later.

ABOUT THE work

How would you describe what you write?

I’m drawn to stories about ripple effects: how one event, one wound, one choice, or one relationship can change not only a person, but everyone connected to them. My work usually begins with one central rupture, then expands outward into the relationships, consequences, and emotional fallout around it.
I don’t shy away from writing ugly or uncomfortable things, because that is part of life. I’m interested in the mess: the way people hurt each other, cling to each other, misunderstand each other, and still keep trying to survive themselves.

What themes do you find yourself returning to again and again?

I return to grief a lot, but not only grief in the traditional sense of death and aftermath. I’m interested in all kinds of loss: the loss of people, love, friendship, safety, identity, and the version of yourself you thought you were becoming.
When people think of grief, they often imagine sadness or missing someone. But grief can also look like destroying things you want, running from what you need, refusing to heal, or being too afraid to try. That is usually where I like to sit: in the uncomfortable space where loss changes how people love, choose, and survive.
Restaurants also appear often in my work. As We Are originally began with Katy working in an elite Manhattan restaurant, while my past project, You Chase, I Chase centered heavily around restaurant life. House Rules grew from that same world, with a sharper focus on social hierarchy, power, and the invisible systems that shape a dining room. I spent eighteen years working in hospitality, five of them in New York City, so I’m familiar with the brutality that can exist beneath what guests see.
Food and drinks carry symbolic weight in my books too. Sometimes they represent comfort, intimacy, control, avoidance, or power. In As I Was, especially, food becomes a means of control, which makes ordinary domestic moments feel much more charged.

How would you describe your writing style?

I always tell people I’m a dialogue writer first. When I write a scene, I usually do one straight pass of dialogue before adding action, description, or setting. It helps me understand what the characters are thinking, what they are avoiding, and what they need from each other before I shape it into a full scene.
I once heard Jodi Picoult describe her characters as whispering what they need her to know and she just translates it through the keyboard. That is often how writing feels for me: less like inventing people from scratch and more like listening closely enough to translate them onto the page.
Description and imagery usually come later. I tend to start with voice, tension, and emotional truth. I may not always know what the room looks like at first, but I know what the characters need someone to understand.

ABOUT THE PROJECTS

Which project has changed the most while writing it?

As We Are, for sure. It started as a project about when I moved to New York City in 2017 and restaurant work. Over time, it shifted toward Katy and Joseph: his life at the bodega, her work in restaurants, and the relationship forming between them.
There were entire storylines that no longer exist, including one involving a busser named Oliver. Then I introduced Jaidon in late 2024, and the whole book changed. His presence altered the structure of the story, opened the door to Brisa, and complicated almost every relationship in the manuscript. In 2026, I added the Jonah storyline, which shifted the book again by giving Katy’s writing arc a much clearer shape.
As I Was surprised me too. It began as something I was writing mostly for myself, a way to understand what happened to Jaidon before As We Are. Then I kept writing and realized it was becoming its own book: a prequel about childhood, attachment, survival, and the early wounds that shape him later.

What inspired Across Hollowbone Ridge?

Across Hollowbone Ridge is interesting because it is currently my only book that does not take place in New York City. It began as a silly little chapter inspired by my favorite hockey player, written for my best friend, and then it started growing into something much bigger.
As I expanded it, I pulled from my experience living for a year in a very small town. After spending so much time writing city stories, it felt almost relieving to step into a different kind of world: woods, mountains, rivers, quiet roads, local lore, and the strange intimacy of places where everyone knows each other’s business.
The psychological thriller element came later, and that has been the biggest challenge. Once the story became about grief, danger, folklore, and something moving through the woods, I had to make sure the emotional arc and the external threat fit together.

Which project feels the most personal to you?

city boys., probably. It’s a collection of essays about men I have met who changed me, most of them platonically. The original goal of the project was to celebrate them: to write about the men who shaped me, challenged me, protected me, or appeared at a time when I needed someone without fully understanding why.
As I worked on it, I found myself much more emotional than I expected. I knew these people mattered to me, but I did not realize how deeply until I started putting the memories on the page. Writing the essays helped me see the importance of my relationships with them: the conversations they had with me and the small acts of care I never realized at the time impacted me greatly.
As the project grew, I began threading in more of my own personal struggles, which gave the essays a fuller shape. But at its heart, city boys. is still about gratitude, memory, and the people who left me different than they found me.

Which project has been the hardest to write?

As I Was has been the hardest to write. It deals with child neglect, emotional abuse, manipulation, coercion, and a mother whose life exposes Jaidon to things he is too young to understand. The challenge has been writing those realities with care: making them feel honest and accurate without becoming explicit, exploitative, or unintentionally glamorizing anything harmful.
It has also required me to write from the mind of a nine-year-old, which is new for me. Most of my work is written from adult perspectives, so entering Jaidon’s childhood meant paying close attention to what a child would notice, misunderstand, absorb, and blame himself for.
Some scenes were difficult enough that I cried while writing them. I also spoke with mandated reporters while working on the book, trying to understand how certain situations might realistically unfold. Their insight reminded me that while As I Was is fiction, many children live versions of this reality every day.