Penning Poetry, Lyrics, and Prose
I have always loved words and stories. A voracious reader for most of my life, I have long enjoyed leaping into the world of a great tale. I like wordplay, am fluent in Spanish, proficient in Italian, and have taken courses in Hebrew and French. I have written poetry, essays, short stories, and songs since I learned to read and write, and one of my majors at UC Berkeley was English (the other, music), my Master’s from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism (where I co-founded what is now the award-winning Annenberg Digital News and won the Director’s Award for Excellence and Carnegie- and Knight Foundations News 21 Multimedia Reporting Fellowship) was multimedia journalism.
Here, you can read and download the liner notes and lyrics to my recent and upcoming album, “Being, Becoming”. This is a recent piece I wrote for my Substack about a chord progression I think signals something very specific — and literary — in film scores from numerous cinematic works. I interned at Los Angeles Magazine and New America Media, have written for The Huffington Post, Berkeley Poetry Review, Buzzfeed, the Sacramento Bee, La Opinion, The News & Observer, Beliefnet, Ravishly, The Hogwarts Professor, Spot.Us, Our Weekly, Vocal and Medium media, Eucatastrophe, and Anglofiles, among others, and worked at the Los Angeles Times before transitioning to full-time teaching of English and student Journalism (though I continued to freelance). Others have cited my articles in their academic pieces in journals and for their courses. As a reporter, I enjoyed covering religion, education, and the arts and have a passion for OpEd, arts criticism, and the long form and meditative essay. As a young adult, my experiences of reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Orwell, and Joan Didion had significant impacts on me, and I love teaching the essay-form. In my prose, poetry, and lyrics, I often write about nostalgia and the passage of time, music, film, and things folkloric.
For an edition of Pedagogy and Profession, I wrote and published “Teaching Chaucer from the Perspective of a Troubadour and Using Music in the Classroom to Further Explain Literature,” an academic paper and personal essay’s explaining my use of music in the English classroom and teaching literature and writing through music. It also includes links to the music I wrote to accompany my teaching of literature and that I discuss in this work. I have written about Judaism, women, joy, and magic for At the Well.
I really enjoy editing others’ work and recently served as a peer-reviewer for Literature Compass in addition to doing so on a contract-basis. Of the roughly 250 songs I have released since 2020, nearly 100 present lyrics I have penned (not including their various versions), and I take great pride in the storytelling I share in those works. I have further writing education from Cambridge University, UCLA, and Bard College and am grateful to have had the mentorship of talented educators and writers. I continue to both attend and lead writing workshops and have written several manuscripts — of lyrics, poetry, short stories, and essays — and am always jotting ideas down in sundry journals and notes for later.