I've been writing for as long as I can remember — stories, poetry, articles, whatever the moment called for. Storytelling isn't a hobby I picked up; it's a lens I've used to make sense of everywhere I've been.

And I've been to a lot of places — 38 U.S. states and 32 countries, from graduate fieldwork in the jungles of Belize and Costa Rica, to diving between two oceans in a single day off Panama, to several nights with an indigenous family on the floating reed islands of Lake Titicaca. I've wandered the Scottish Highlands, crossed from Tangier to the edge of the Sahara in Morocco, and island-hopped the Caribbean from the Bahamas to Barbados. Those years of travel taught me the same lesson Portete is built on: the most interesting stories happen at the edges of the map, among people willing to risk everything for a world of their own making.

Portete, my debut novel, has been part of that journey for nearly two decades — I started writing it back in 2007, sharing early chapters with a small circle of friends online. It's grown since then into a story of a shipwrecked journalist pulled into a pirate captain's world of secrets, set across the taverns, ports, and drawing rooms of the early 1700s Caribbean.

I'm based in St. Petersburg, Florida.