Works in Progress
Queen Azalea (a historical fiction novel)
See a video of the author reading from this novel at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Lit Fest, June 3, 2017.
Fear is a Friend (a memoir)
See a video of the author reading from this memoir at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Lit Fest, June 4, 2016.
Various personal essays
Publications
Haiku published in Three Line Poetry, Issue #45, September 2017.
Read the free online version
"Glossy Pages", Palimpsest, University of Colorado Creative Arts Journal, 2010.
Reviewed by the Poetry in Picture Series blog, December, 11, 2010
Sentinels of the Sun: Forecasting Space Weather, by Barbara B. Poppe and Kristen P. Jorden, Johnson Books, Boulder, 2006.
Reviewed in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 88, No. 5, May 2007.
Reviewed in the Space Weather Quarterly, Vol. 4, Issue 2, 2007.
Nominated for the 2006 Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award.
Available from Amazon.com
History Book Recommendations
In graduate school I wrote a paper analyzing high school U.S. history textbooks for the presence of women, Native Americans, African Americans, and other minorities. These groups appeared mostly in sidebars and “special feature” sections, and so were separated from the main narrative of U.S. History. These groups had indexes in the back because how else would you find the scattered mentions of them in the massive tome of American History? Tellingly, “white people” and “men” had no index in the back.
The adult equivalent to the “special feature” sidebars in our high school textbooks are the special months for each group — Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Pride Month. Each month we close the box on one “special feature” of history, and pull out facts about women, or Asian Americans, then ready our rainbow flags. What troubles me is that America uses these special feature months as an excuse to not teach about these groups in “real” history class. The actual history of the United States is the history of women, racial and ethnic minorities, poor and working-class people, handicapped people, and LGBTQIA people — they are not a sidebar to wealthy white men’s history. It behooves each of us to know this history, even if we weren’t taught it in school. We must educate ourselves.
Click on each book then hover your cursor over the image to get a brief description. Enjoy!
