Queen Azalea
Available July 12, 2025!
1903. It begins the day they take Lily’s body from Azalea’s arms. For weeks, she remains inside, suspended in her unbreachable grief. Then, without warning, Azalea is seized by the police and committed to a remote asylum, as her twelve-year-old son, Corbin, watches helplessly from the doorway. Determined to bring her home, Corbin slips away under cover of night to the asylum. But his plan falters, and he is captured and sent to the boys’ reformatory.
Azalea is watched by Superintendent Billingsly who claims he wants to cure her, but is really infatuated with her. Corbin is recognized by the Superintendent Hammersmith who is desperately trying to hide a secret about his past. Twisted in these power struggles, Azalea and Corbin begin to change, turning into the mad woman and juvenile delinquent society presumes them to be. Too much longer apart and the benevolent institutions determined to “save” them will swallow them up. With time running out, all four characters determine to get what they want regardless of who they must hurt.
Told in four interwoven perspectives, Queen Azalea is a quiet reckoning with grief, identity, and the slow, insidious violence of systems that insist they know what’s best.
(TW // sexual violence and child loss)
Books ship on July 12th! Local folks can choose “pick-up” as a shipping option.
For international orders, send me an email and we’ll coordinate!
See a video of the author reading from an early version of this novel at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Lit Fest, June 3, 2017!
Works in Progress
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.
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!
