I was raised in Brooklyn. That sentence does a lot of work, and I will not decorate it. The borough teaches volume, timing, and the difference between a story that happened and a story that is being performed. Both kinds walk into a novel. Only one of them should be allowed to run it.
LaGuardia gave me business administration. John Jay gave me criminology. I did not go to those rooms so I could print the degrees on a book flap and call it a personality. I went because I wanted language for systems — money, law, motive — that already ran the lives I was watching.
Criminology is useful to a novelist in a way workshops sometimes are not. It trains you to ask what the person needed, what they told themselves, what the scene looked like from the hallway. It also trains you not to fall in love with your own theory. A theory that cannot survive a real kitchen is just rhetoric.
The writing started young and never agreed to leave. Articles first, then poems, then the longer work. Sooper Articles, Ezine, Grief Digest. Poem Hunter and the other walls where a poem can stand without a publicist. None of that was a ladder I pretended was destiny. It was reps. You write until the sentence can carry the thing you actually mean.
If you are looking for a myth of overnight arrival, this is the wrong desk. If you are looking for the books, they are on the books page. If you are looking for the person who wrote them, she is still from Brooklyn, still watching, and still not shy about the subjects that make a room go quiet.