About me

Recently, when a man stepped from the shadows and into my life, he turned the key and opened the mysterious door revealing information I hadn’t known. 

Or maybe I had known. 

Throughout my life, I’ve often been asked about my origins (apparently, a dark complexion warrants such a question). Although I have no explanation as to why or how, since childhood, a place inside me answered “I’m Cuban,” but aloud I’d say, “I don’t know. I was adopted.” Those inquiring individuals sometimes took it upon themselves to guess: Hungarian! Brazilian! Spanish! Middle Eastern! Italian! Privately, I took all their guesses under consideration like a collection of nesting dolls. 

Granted–and a story within itself–I’d discovered my wonderful biological mother thirty years prior (fair-skinned, blonde hair, and blue-eyed like my sons), but she could not provide answers to the questions I sought about my biological father, questions that lingered and festered.

Then, a few years back, on my birthday weekend, Synchronicity happened. On that Friday night, my partner broached the subject of my paternity. For an hour, he queried me, aching to understand why that door was closed and how I was able to live with it. The next morning, quite out of the blue and at virtually the same time, I received two texts. One was from my oldest son, “Mom, when are you going to get an Ancestry kit so we can figure this thing out?” and the other from my biological cousin, “I’m still waiting for you to take Ancestry so I can plug you into our family tree.” Phone in hand, I flicked away their texts and opened a word game app and an ad popped up, “Mother’s Day special: AncestryDNA kit half price.”

I’m a believer in signs, and this one was hard to ignore. 

I ordered the kit.

A month later, when the results came in, I called my son to tell him about the maps and percentages of my genealogy. While still on the phone, I clicked around…and froze. 

“Wait a minute,” I’d said, “there are names listed here. I see yours, my birth mother’s, and my cousin’s down below, but the top name I don’t recognize.”

When I told him the name, he said, “Holy cow! I’ve gotten emails from someone by that name for the last year, but never opened them.”

He found the emails, opened them, and three weeks later a whole new family embraced us as their own.

In short, my childhood internal knowing had been right: I’m half Cuban.

Career-wise, I’m a high school art teacher, and as good as I am at it, my favorite medium is the written word…something I share with my bio dad.

Being an empty-nester closing in on retirement, I thought it time to transition. And I had a story. My debut novel, Woman Without Provenance, is a mystery-suspense-domestic thriller set in the Florida Panhandle. Currently, I’m writing my second mystery novel set in a rural county in Georgia. Once finished, I’ll return to Woman Without Provenance for two sequels.

As far as my writing resume is concerned, I’ve written a picture book about mermaids which teaches color theory (unpublished). My short story, “I’m April. I’m Four,” was a finalist in an online competition. It’s included under the bonus material tab.

Woman Without Provenance Synopsis:  Art history professor, Dr. Amelia Harper, stumbles across an undocumented painting that’s been hidden for decades among student works stored in the campus museum archives. Despite her life being a mess at the present, namely being stalked by her unhinged ex-husband, she investigates the painting’s provenance. But the investigation isn’t so simple…and neither is her ex. The closer Amelia gets to discovering the painting’s origins, the closer she gets to discovering her family secret. And the closer her ex gets to becoming a killer.