I’m a San Francisco–based freelance journalist and writer with a passion for exploring the human experience. Throughout my life, I’ve been drawn to the underdog and to the stories that live in the shadows. I don’t look away from difficult truths. Instead, I process them—and help others make sense of them—through writing.

I hold a master of arts degree in cultural reporting and criticism from New York University, and a bachelor of arts degree in rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley.

After graduate school, I cut my teeth as a senior reporter at Law360, where I covered nationwide litigation and regulatory issues. My beat included reporting on developments in personal injury, product defect, and wrongful death lawsuits against global drug companies and medical device makers, analysis of state and federal legislative developments involving the health care industry, and features on district and appellate jurisdictional trends.

My experience in the area of product liability issues in the health care industry, particularly relating to pharmaceutical companies, took a personal turn when my youngest brother became addicted to painkillers and ultimately died of a heroin overdose, informing my first book, Generation Rx: A Story of Dope, Death, and America’s Opiate Crisis (Counterpoint Press, 2014). During this time I also founded and ran the Oxy Watchdog blog, a newswire-style website that provided information and resources about the fast-growing epidemic of prescription drug and heroin addiction.

After the publication of my book, I spent a decade focused on raising my three children. I live in San Francisco with my partner, my kids, three guinea pigs, and 17 fish (or is it 27?)

While my expertise is in the courtroom, the stories I continue to be drawn to are the ones that highlight the complexities of the human experience. In 2007, I was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism for my profile of a homeless transgender teenager battling the streets of New York City. In 2012, I collaborated with the Center for Investigative Reporting and KQED Radio to report and produce “Suburban Junkies,” which was awarded the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence in Journalism from the Society for Professional Journalists.

I love to travel, and have spent time freelance reporting in countries such as India, Bosnia and Russia. My work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon.com, Law360, California Watch/Center for Investigative Reporting, KQED Radio, SF Weekly, In The Fray Magazine, and the Moscow Times, among others. During the pandemic, I dipped my toes into fiction, collaborating with a writer friend to produce a character-driven trilogy of literary erotica set in San Francisco.

I am currently working on a collection of personal essays on motherhood and spirituality.