Novels

I am currently seeking representation for my YA novel:

TO HEAR WITH YOUR HEART (60,700 words)

In 1980, 15-year-old Dinah Burns, a white music student from Boston, spends a summer with her adored artist aunt and Black uncle in southern Ohio, in the distinguished Black enclave of the uncle’s racially-divided hometown. The town of Prestland seems like a park to Dinah after the Boston subways and Boston’s busing crisis, and she swiftly develops strong feelings for her talented student teacher. While she brushes off the sharp glances and comments that her travels around town elicit from certain young white men, including two policemen, her uncle clashes with her at every turn, criticizing her manner, dress, and blinkered focus. By the time Dinah grasps his serious concern, she has unwittingly inflamed long-standing racial resentments, not least among a nascent white-supremacist group, over her uncle’s community’s legacy and her aunt and uncle’s historic house. Dinah has to summon all her gifts for listening, and new courage, to cooperate with her uncle’s young cousins in saving the family’s refuge for the next generation.

OTHER NOVELS:

My adult novel is on the slipway for repairs: Two young mothers swear a defiant pact of solidarity that upends both their lives when one faces homelessness and loss of custody of her child.

Recently, I have broken the ice on a long-planned second YA novel set in the tenth century, in Iceland, on the ocean, and in Vinland (North America). A shared artistic motif reunites some very far-flung relatives who have not been treating each other as kin.