I am an award-winning freelance journalist based in Brooklyn (formerly based in Providence, R.I.), an erstwhile fact-checker at Esquire, and an Adjunct Lecturer in the English Department at Brooklyn College. I recently graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction from the New School, where my graduate thesis was a book-length work of narrative journalism about hepatitis C and addiction. This is not a blog, but rather a collection of some of my work.

My favorite stories are about people: people who do unlikely or awe-inspiring things, people with dreams and visions and singular voices, people and communities whose voices are marginalized or forgotten by the popular press. I have a special interest in the criminal justice system and health care for the underserved and disenfranchised, particularly HIV/AIDS. (Before I became a journalist, I worked as an outreach worker and research assistant at an HIV clinic.) I also write news and book reviews, and have been known to write enthusiastically about music, politics, contraception, and goofy antics.

Thanks for stopping by to take a look at my clips.

Publishers Weekly>Fiction reviews>Trudy Hopedale







Trudy Hopedale
Jeffrey Frank. Simon & Schuster, $24 (240p) ISBN 978-1-4165-4924-6

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 30, 2007

Pettiness, backstabbing, social striving and tit-for-tat favors are “the gasoline in this town”—Washington, D.C.—in the third fast-paced, entertaining Beltway sendup from New Yorker editor Frank (following The Columnist and Bad Publicity). As the Clintons make way for the Bushes in 2000–2001, the novel follows Trudy Hopedale, television host of a certain age and D.C. social mainstay, who is fast fading into political and social obsolescence. Trudy’s husband, Roger, is a retired career Foreign Service man with a shady past who is working on an embarrassing novel, while “handsome and brilliant” vice-presidential biographer Donald Frizzé is suffering from writer’s block. As the gelling Bush administration creates shifting power dynamics and loyalties, readers must read between the lines to gather information from these three very different unreliable narrators, each with secrets and ulterior motives of his or her own. Supporting cast members are one-dimensional, and Trudy can seem too petty even for satire, but Frank’s lively writing and sharp eye for the story’s fourth major character, the “soiled town” that is political Washington, carry the day. (July)
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