TIME • 9th May 2024

My Mother Needed Mental Health Treatment. She Got a Jail Cell

I was still thinking in Italian when I got the call from a family friend. My mother had set her house on fire, the friend told me, and was being held in county jail on charges of Felony arson.

Los Angeles Times • 28th April 2024

Self-Immolation Channels the Times

Ten years before I was born, at 4:40 on the morning of Nov. 10, 1971, my mother and another woman sat “yogi-style” on the floor of an Ann Arbor, Mich., kitchen and lit themselves on fire.

Gossamer • 1st April 2021

All The Things We Cannot Keep

I have this set of love letters. Their envelopes are worn soft. The papery rectangles are hand-painted by an artist, a man whose small-town swagger captured me at 15, and again at 20 in a dark, smelly bar I snuck into.

Burn It Down: An Anthology • 30th October 2019

A Girl, Dancing (excerpt)

I am a girl, dancing. In shimmering floor-to-ceiling studio mirrors, my leg traced the half moon of rond de jambe. My body in arabesque was an arrow ready to pierce the sky.

NYLON • 4th June 2019

An Ode To The Bodysuit

As a flat-chested '90s tween, I spent most of my time in a one-piece. On weekends, I rocked trendy snap-crotch bodysuits while running my neighborhood dance troupe's rehearsal to "Baby Got Back."

Electric Literature • 14th March 2019

The Lost City of Lemuria

My first language was one of transcendence. I was raised by a single, nomadic mother on a relentless spiritual journey, and my childhood was laced with chatter of ascended masters and astral traveling.

Narratively • 21st January 2019

My Adventures With Dr. Lovewisdom

"Go all the way down this road,” the driver said as he pulled my giant backpack from the combi, a hybrid van-taxi, before chugging off and leaving me at the gated entrance to Vilcabamba, Ecuador’s southernmost village.

Catapult • 13th September 2018

The Heart of Padre Pio

I waited in line for an hour to see his heart, eating sausage in a semolina bun with roasted hot and sweet peppers, watching children chase each other around headstones in the church graveyard as live Polka music blared.