Personal Information

Writer
I write nonfiction with a focus on literature, history, and politics. I am currently an academic author, but I worked for many years as a freelance author and staff writer for various newspapers, including the Ethiopian Review, the Ethiopian Tribune, and the Seattle Times. I have won numerous awards for my writing, including the Dick Goldensohn Grant for Innovative Journalism 1998, a Fulbright-Hayes Research Grant 1997, Washington State Governor's Writers Award 1988, and Martha Albrand/PEN Society Finalist for first book of nonfiction 1988.

Lecturer
I have been teaching about writing or literature since 1997. For more information about my professional workshops, please see the web pages for academic writing, academic copyediting, or academic journal publishing.

Editor
I was a freelance copyeditor or staff managing editor for many years. I served as the editor-in-chief of my high-school newspaper and after college edited textbooks for a small educational publisher outside Washington, D.C. I left the educational publisher to write my first book and then worked as a freelancer editing government publications, nonprofit newsletters, and community newspapers (written by people for whom English was not a first language). I then started a copyediting business serving such academic publishers as Oxford University Press, the University of California Press, and Routledge. In this capacity I spent almost a decade editing scholarly books on everything from Nigerian artists to Newtonian dynamics. From 1995 to 2007, I ran a small press called the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, where I published a biannual peer-reviewed journal on Chicanos (the journal of record in the field), several other periodicals, DVDs, and scholarly books (including the first English-Zapotec dictionary in the world). Now I am an academic.