I have always loved to tell stories.

Family stories were a part of my life when I was growing up, and we seemed to have no shortage of them. As my own family grows up, we have added our own sagas to the list of favorites that we still retell (“Mom, tell me again about how Paw Paw’s hair caught on fire on New Year’s Eve!”).

Stories have also formed the way that I teach. The longer I have taught, the more I have found that stories are, in fact, the best way to teach history. Sometimes I found that the right resource- whether a gripping narrative about early Rome or a sweeping background piece to the Persian Wars- just didn’t exist. So I began writing my own.

I also know that the written word often comes easier to me than the spoken one (unless it’s a story I’m telling, of course). And so, for the past decade or so, I worked to distill my thoughts on various subjects by writing them down. My Publications page includes many of these pieces.

Inspiration for a longer work of historical fiction began to take hold in 2019. Through the pandemic and wildfire evacuations, I wrote, knowing that the story of one boy in 61 AD would become a good one, one that I wanted to share with the world.