THE RUMPUS
July 2015
-FIRST PLACE IN 2015 SOUL-MAKING KEATS LITERARY COMPETITION
As the door in the back of the courtroom opened, I watched the jurors file in. I looked at my three trial partners and my client before I fixed my face into its well-worn litigator mask, presenting a stoic, cool gaze forward. In a ten-week-long trial with thousands of government and defense exhibits, the jurors had deliberated for only two days. It was December 21, 2011—four days before Christmas. Maybe the jury just wanted this ordeal to be over. I felt optimistic as I watched the jurors. My trial team and I believed that our client Tarek was no terrorist.

LITERARY MAMA
December 2017
-HONORABLE MENTION/NONFICTION AT MENDOCINO COAST WRITERS’ CONFERENCE 2016
My daughter and I were waiting in the emergency room when she told me. I looked at her, my spunky, carefree eight-year-old. Her long legs dangled off the edge of the examination table as she tried to negotiate the crinkling paper beneath her. Above her head hung a broken cuckoo clock, its arms frozen in an awkward salute.

​THE CHAMPION
April 2014
Almost 80 years old, Ruth Johns said earlier this year, “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be around to take care of my son.” Ruth’s son, Guy Randolph, is schizophrenic. He was also a child molester. Guy insisted that he had not committed the crime for which he was convicted: molesting a six year-old girl at knifepoint in Roslindale, Mass., on New Year’s Eve in 1990.

​CREATIVE NONFICTION #58
Winter 2016
-A TOP 10 STORY FROM 2016 BY CREATIVE NONFICTION MAGAZINE
Here is a question for our times: can memory represent truth when technology can reveal far more than we might remember? I answer that question differently based on what professional hat I am wearing. The attorney in me knows that a video or photograph is better evidence of an event than memory alone. As a writer, though, my memories feel holy to me—an amalgam of fact and feeling where vague recollection can, in itself, be the treasured memory.

THE MAINE REVIEW
January 2021
Sunlight filters through the stained glass windows amidst the tall columns supporting the ceiling of Iglesia de la Merced—built in 1534 by the Spanish conquerors of Nicaragua—and illuminates the altar of Virgen de Fatima. I find my mother there, standing before a giant sculpture of the crucifixion. The Son on the cross, his mother by his side. Both silent. My mom’s eyes are closed, her head bowed, and her tiny ponytail bounces up and down as she chants something to herself. 

​CREATIVE NONFICTION #54
Winter 2014
“Cows are very smart,” my mom bragged. “You know, they can find their way home.”

She paused. “It’s true.”