When I was young, I remember being enamored with my father's books on the Cuban revolution as well as our monthly subscription of National Geographic. Within these pages were my first encounters with a world beyond the my suburban home in Allentown, Pennsylvania and they instilled in me a love of travel, reading, and photography. When I left home, my appetite to learn and travel soon saw me working in a number of different disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, and conservation in an effort gain field research experience. Following university, I worked as a gardener and writer for the Rodale Institute before joining the US Peace Corps in Paraguay where I served for the next two years as an agriculture extentionist and development practitioner.

I continued my work in rural development and agricultural systems, completing research for my masters degree in Geography on Ghanaian agriculture and bartering markets. In between, I have had the opportunity to work on a number of projects in ecology, development, and conservation in a number of different countries, most recently Australia, South Africa, Mozambique and Cuba. Today, I am a homesteader in Franklin, New Hampshire along with my partner as well as a freelance writer of fiction and non-fiction. My work has been featured in Guernica, National Geographic and various academic journals. I recently completed my doctorate in geography at Clark University with research on the Cuban agroecological transition. I really want to get a dog. I finally got a dog. His name is Goose. He is my best friend.

research:

My work focuses on agricultural livelihoods, ecology, and rural development. My time working in the field as a practitioner and researcher has given me a great appreciation of the ingenuity, knowledge and resilience of small-scale farmers in all parts of the world. In my research, I am particularly interested in how forms of sustainable agriculture can help address intersecting issues such as food security, malnutrition and poverty while also adapting to a changing climate.  I recently completed my doctoral dissertation on the the ecology and sustainability of agriculture in Cuba.

:philosophy

Stories, whether oral or written, sung or spoken or seen, are our currency as human beings. Numbers and statistics are important, but a good story has a way of changing how people see and understand the world. Even researchers are really just storytellers attempting to create coherent narratives out of disparate sets of data and field observations. For my research, I feel that the stories of small-scale farmers across the world are some of the most worthy of telling. I believe that their stories contain insights and knowledge that are especially important in this age of climatic change.