About Me
My Day Job
I'm an award-winning journalist at The Arizona Republic and azcentral, Arizona's most widely read news source. I'm mostly an editor these days, working with storytelling reporters and overseeing the environment team.
Plan B
As the journalism world evolved and contracted, most of us watching from the inside started talking about our Plan B, for when our name came up. I'm still here, but I've also activated my own Plan B.
It's a Mystery
Some of the first real chapter books I remember reading as a kid were Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators. I moved on to the Hardy Boys, Agatha Christie and ... hey, this is what I want to do. So that's what I'm doing.
My Words
A Fatal Chain of Events Unfolds
In the weeks after the deadly attack at a Tucson Safeway, where then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was meeting constituents, I worked with my colleagues at The Arizona Republic to write a narrative reconstruction of the shooting. The story was later published in the anthology "True Crime."
Alone on the Hill
In June 2013, 19 elite wildland firefighters died in a fire near the Arizona town of Yarnell. The men had been on the scene barely a day when they died, but the tragic events were rooted in hundred-year-old policies and the worst drought in 1,500 years. We investigated and I worked with colleagues to write a deep narrative of the fire, its causes and the men who died.
The Men Who Survived
On December 7, 1941, 1,117 sailors and Marines aboard the battleship USS Arizona died in the attack on Pearl Harbor. When the smoke cleared, there were 335 survivors. In 2014, we decided to locate the remaining survivors from the Arizona and tell their stories. There were 10 when we began, nine by the time we began traveling the country to interview them. The result was the narrative telling of where they came from, how they found themselves aboard the Arizona and how they reunited on the memorial in December 2014.