I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada and cut my teeth in journalism at the Toronto Star newspaper, which sent me to cover the 1989 opening of the Berlin Wall. I moved to Berlin a year later, from where I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Financial Post of Canada and CBC Radio, among others. I then worked as TIME Magazine’s Berlin correspondent for nearly three years. Upon returning to Canada in 1995, I became a Senior Writer at Maclean’s, Canada’s national news magazine. I headed abroad again in 1998, as the Jerusalem-based Middle East Bureau Chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers (now McClatchy).
Since arriving in California in 2001, I have written for publications such as Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, and I returned to school for my Masters degree, an MFA in Writing (Nonfiction) at Pacific University in Oregon. In recent years, I have transitioned to teaching, first at Moorpark College and California Lutheran University. I went on to serve as Program Chair for Visual Journalism at Brooks Institute, a visual and media arts college in Ventura, and then taught for three years at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in Los Angeles.
Currently, I teach in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In addition to teaching and public speaking, I am in the midst of several reporting and writing projects. As a writer and journalist, I am very excited by the technological changes that have radically altered the journalism and publishing worlds in the past decade. It is a wonderful time to be a creative person engaged in an interconnected world that has made expression and communication accessible to so many. I am enjoying turning my own work into a multimedia experience available on a variety of platforms and to teaching multimedia journalism for the digital age. As someone who values good writing and clear thinking, I seek to pass on to the next generation the journalistic and literary values that I grew up with.