About the Author

My journey to writing novels was staggered and tip-toed across. I got my start writing songs in a high school funk band, and for the longest time I believed that I couldn't express anything unless it rhymed. As a college student, I lived in Philadelphia where I studied Anthropology at Temple University, and throughout that experience I felt an undercurrent telling me that I wasn't moving in the right direction, that I was denying something, that I was stifling the true aspects of who I was and what I was feeling, that I wasn't expressing it right. In my Senior Year I took a fiction class, and immediately I felt that there was something there, something unexplored and rich for me to dig into. So I started writing a terrible novel and after graduation, took my 2001 Hyundai Elantra and my meager restaurant-work savings and drove north with no plans other than to see how long I could make it in the woods by myself. I ended up spending six months camping across the country, eating hard boiled eggs and cold sausages, exchanging coffee for toilet paper with strangers, almost dying in the mountains of Utah, and facing the traumas of my childhood in some of the most beautiful and terrifying landscapes I'd ever seen. When I returned, I had most of a terrible novel handwritten across five notebooks, and the understanding that if I wanted to really be a writer, I'd need to make a commitment and study with the experts. I am so thankful for the faculty at SAIC who could see through me and guide my voice towards what I had been seeking since Philadelphia: a true and conscious expression of who I was, and what was important to me. With the completion of "Children of Mandrake," and with all novels and writings going forward, I intend to always search out and explore those aspects of myself that are, not yearning, but whispering to be brought out on the page. I hope that this story brings you joy, reflection, distraction, or anything that you feel you could use. 

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This is my first novel and my first website, so I thank you for your patience and interest. I will be periodically updating this site with my other short publications, news of future events, and art for sale from the incredible Samantha Meng Shui.