I’m a small-town Midwesterner with a restless curiosity about the world and the people who shape it. That curiosity has pulled me far from home, into the complicated spaces where cultures overlap and stories collide. I’ve spent much of my adult life living and working overseas: in Madagascar, where political upheaval crashes against the island’s wild abundance, and on the tiny island of Mauritius, one of Africa’s most hopeful nations.

I’ve traveled Zimbabwe’s rivers by houseboat, spent long summers in the quiet countryside of Ibiza, and wandered the cobbled backstreets of Europe’s forgotten towns. Along the way, I’ve learned that no country is ever just its postcard image. Beneath the beauty live contradictions, of privilege and survival, of myth and memory, of histories waiting to be unearthed.

All of it feeds my fiction: adventure stories layered with cultural depth, written with both reverence and curiosity, always from the perspective of an outsider quietly transformed by the places that take them in. In essence, my work explores what happens when outsiders stay long enough to become insiders. Once Upon an Expat is an expression of that journey, a cycle of literary novels rooted in the languages, landscapes, and legacies of the countries that have shaped me.