I grew up on the edge of Santa Barbara, when the place we lived was still essentially rural. I loved to walk in our foothills, and I loved plants. I was a 4-H girl, into cooking and raising chickens. I had fifty hens, and my first business was an egg route — I went around my neighborhood with a red wagon full of egg cartons, delivering to my customers. I had a rooster that was two-foot-one and weighed fourteen pounds, won a blue ribbon at the county fair, and chased my little brother (bonus).

Many years later I am an historian and landscape architect, researcher and writer. I wrote my dissertation on apocalypticism in the ancient Mediterranean world. My academic career brought me to Jordan, where eventually Fulbright research on Umayyad period water politics drew me into work on Jordan’s contemporary water concerns. I fell in love with Jordan, and I never wanted to leave. I wanted to spend the rest of my life fucking around in the desert. In the early 2000s I retooled as a landscape architect (MLA University of Arizona, Tucson) — looking at the conservation and management of arid lands — and went back to Jordan. Since 2004 I have consulted on a variety of UNDP, USAID, GOJ, UNESCO, and private sector projects in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, all of them focused on the intersections of cultural and natural heritage. For too many sad reasons I had to leave Jordan in 2016, though I still “commuted” from the U.S., until the pandemic.

Now I am settled in Tucson again. I bought a century-old adobe house in the barrio viejo, and spent three years rejuvenating it and building a garden. Which has been a labor of love.

Throughout, I write. At Pomona College I was an award-winning writer of fiction and poetry. After two masters’ theses and a doctoral dissertation, my career as a landscape architect has been defined by in-depth site analyses of rangelands, tourist sites, national parks, and UNESCO World Heritage Sites such as Petra and at-Turaif. I have published a number of articles and written two novels, the first of which — The Intervals — was a finalist for the Page Turner awards in 2020.

My second novel, The Servant of Dreams, is inspired by my work, my colleagues, and my friends in Jordan, especially during the uneasy years just after Arab Spring.