About Me

There are Ten Things You Need to Know:

1. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. I wrote my first short story when I was 8, and I wrote a lot of bad fan-fiction in my teens (Star Wars, Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Star Blazers). When I was 16, I started writing my own science fiction and fantasy stories.
2. I currently reside in Wisconsin with my husband and a Siberian cat named Allegro (our two kids are grown and flown, living in Boston and Washington DC). Prior to my life in cheesehead-land, I spent 10 years in Los Angeles, and I grew up on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, surrounded by beautiful beaches and forests.
3. I’m biracial (my father was Mexican-American) and I identify as Latinx, despite my pale Midwestern complexion.
4. I love to cook and bake, and I know a lot about spices.
5. Before having kids, I was an archaeologist. Although I never had adventures worthy of an Indiana Jones movie, I worked on everything from a Crusader Castle in Israel to the remains of a shipwreck in Turkey to a medieval site in Spain.
6. I love to travel. In 2009, our entire family spent five months in Chennai, India, when my husband worked there as part of a Fulbright Teaching Exchange (you can read about it in The Cullens in India: http://cullensindia.blogspot.com/).
7. I’m a serious musical theatre geek and I have a blog series, Musical Mondays, where I spotlight my favorite shows.
8. I’m a member of SCBWI and RWA (and I belong to the YA, Contemporary Romance, and Wisconsin chapters of RWA).
9. I’m a huge font of useless 80s pop culture trivia.
10. I love really good coffee.