events, talks, & media

I love bringing stories into rooms—classrooms, bookstores, libraries, conferences, and Zoom squares. Below you’ll find information about book events, workshops, and media features where I talk about parents and children, great expectations, and the strange, funny work of making meaning out of a life.

MEDIA

I’ve been featured in Huffington Post, Writer’s Digest, Electric Literature, Forbes, Mutha Magazine, Parents Magazine, Grown & Flown, KQED, San Jose Mercury News, The San Francisco Chronicle, TEDx Palo Alto, The Atlantic, and the Pebble Beach Authors and Ideas Festival.

Events

For more information about upcoming and past events, please go to my Events page.

CREATIVE NONFICTION COACHING

I spent almost two decades helping high school students uncover their best stories for college application essays—identifying the nuts and bolts that make a story work, asking searching questions, and teaching them to trust their gut and tune out the voice whispering “No one cares.” Now, I use many of those techniques in my work with memoirists and creative nonfiction writers to brainstorm, develop, and refine their narratives.

If you’re staring at your memoir or creative nonfiction manuscript and muttering, “Is this anything?,” send me your first 10 pages—or the jumble of ideas you’re wrestling with—and we’ll find out together. After I’ve read what you sent me, we will schedule an hour-long Zoom call and discuss what’s working, what’s not, and some potential ways forward. I’m available for both individual coaching and small group workshops. Please contact me for more details.

COLLEGE ADMISSIONS

The college application process is intense, opaque, and deeply fraught—for high school students as well as their parents. In my work as a private college counselor, I focused on helping high school students; after winding down my college counseling practice, I’ve turned my focus to helping their parents. My goal is to help parents understand both the mechanics of the college application process and the social, hereditary, personal, and cultural forces that drive their parenting.

While I no longer work with high school students individually, I believe that both students and parents benefit from taking the time to separate the signal from the noise and to define their own version of meaningful success. I want to help parents view the lead-up to college applications as a rite of passage rather than a journey through the ten circles of hell—in other words, less horror show and more scenic road trip. I’m available to speak with PTOs, PTAs, and other groups to share what I’ve learned as an admissions officer at Stanford and as a private college counselor and to offer suggestions for how parents can navigate the college application process while retaining their sanity and remaining on speaking terms with their teens. Previous appearances include the 2023 Pebble Beach Authors and Ideas Festival and TEDx Palo Alto (“Oracles, Dirty T-Shirts, and ChatGPT: Humanizing College Applications).” Please contact me for more details.

BOOK CLUBS

I love speaking with book clubs, either virtually or in person. My writing focuses on themes that make for rich, far-ranging discussions—generational expectations, imperfect but earnest parenting, the tangled ties that bind families, and how we define success, both for ourselves and for our children. Please contact me for more details.