Memoirs and Standalone Fiction

When her beloved step-grandmother, a semi-retired opera singer, dies of cancer in 1970, 15-year-old Eli Burnes runs away with a draft-dodger, thinking she’s on the road to adventure and romance. What she finds instead is a world of underground Weathermen, Black Power revolutionaries, snitches and shoot-first police. Eventually Eli is rescued by...

A daughter’s memoir of sacrifice and discovery as her ailing mother’s caretaker is “an inspiring story of love, loss and the ravages of aging” (Kirkus).

Like all mothers, mine had a set of maxims that she thought were important to impart to me: if you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all (unless it’s irresistibly funny); it’s...

Trish spends her time hustling and cheating to score. Heroin, Dilauids, whatever she can get.

Precisely plotting the slippery slope of a heroin addict’s existence, The Hummingbird Kiss paints a bleak picture but still manages to offer a ray of hope. The ’70s are young, and 18-year-old Trish is a newlywed. When a Florida judge sentences her junkie...

Jen Johanssen is a former porn actor trying to fit into the world of academia. Her sister, Lolly Johanssen, is a cancer survivor. Nicole Parks is in prison for loving the wrong guy. And Sonya Yakowski, also in prison, is a member of a family of traveling criminals, desperately missing her young son. The lives of these four women converge in a...

The Lullaby Motel is about girls eager to discard their innocence, and women yearning to regain it.
Set in Florida’s land of bare feet, rain puddles, sandspurs, palmettos, giant multi-colored grasshoppers and alarmingly pink azaleas, these stories take place where garish development rises temporarily out of the primordial swamps. Whether the...