Joan Lester, author and diversity educator, has just published a riveting new novel, Mama’s Child, which focuses on the deeply entrenched conflicts between a white mother and her biracial daughter, and which both…

It was great this week to be welcomed by Brooke Warner as a SheWrites author! I'm so pleased to be part of this group and to have a professional team mentoring my book through its stages to publish my new edition of Don't Call Me Mother. Every book, and author, has a history…

Women’s abilities are always being called into question. Take Rick Santorum's poke at women being too emotion for duty at the front lines of combat situations. A select corps of women is fighting back. Read the story of one American and two Afghani teenagers who are trying to make history and become the first…

Charley is a woman who is burdened with immense emotional pain.  She has suffered for herself and for her daughter, Jenny, for many years.  Doctors are able to keep Jenny alive after her heart stops, but to what end?  Confined to her twisted, silent body, Jenny is, for all intents and purposes, gone. 

Gone is a fantasy novel based on the true story of Julie Elizabeth Powell and her daughter Samantha.  In the novel, Charley is thrust into a sometimes strange, sometimes…

I am a very fortunate mother. I say that because I have been blessed with a very loving and caring daughter. Many people want a son as their first child, but I believe it is better to have a daughter first. This is a tribute to loving and caring daughters everywhere, but especially my own. You can see her in my avatar, which was taken when she was less than a year old. We were then living in the South Pacific Island of Tonga.

 …

“Will you have a minute at the end?” whispered The Professor in my ear. He was sitting next to me in the auditorium where the third and final lecture in memory of my mother was about to start. The faces of her mentors and friends – …

Picture this…..your sixteen year old comes home and says, “I want to talk to you and I really want you to listen and think seriously about what I’m going to say.” What is the first thing that goes through your mind? I know…me too…..you hold your breath for a minute and hope for the best…right!?  You just…

The night after we buried my mother, three years ago, two shafts of white light passed at high-speed before my eyes. I must have been dozing. I called out her name.

Somewhere between the sprawling S. João hospital and a granite steeple church, within walking…

I could hear her spelling underneath her breath,

letters strung into words, partial words,

trying to make sense of her sixth grade reader.

This is how it is to have something wrong

in your brain, a literal writer’s block

where the neurons can’t carry out

their simple function, and make you functional,

make you like everyone else. We’re downstairs,

in the finished basement, I’m on the couch, she

on the floor and in between each baby breath

she…

A few days ago, I received a note from the daughter of a friend. The mother, my friend, is a renowned mystery writer who has raised one remarkable child—one who took the same path as her mom at an Ivy League college, where she graduated with honors. Her mother, although a natural writer while in college, decided to become a lawyer and continue to write on the side.…