Fiction
I’ve been writing fiction since high school and have had poems, short stories, and a novel published. I’m currently working on a second novel.
My debut novel:
The Moment Before
America’s global ambitions are reduced to one father, his daughter, and the two men who seek to reunite them.
Tricked by the two people closest to him, Elias Haddad leaves his beloved daughter Cheryl Halia for what he believes is a short trip home to Syria to visit his dying father. Largely ignorant of Middle East politics, Elias is detained upon arrival in Damascus and conscripted into Assad’s army, beginning a forty-year geopolitical odyssey from hell which culminates in his captivity in Guantanamo during America’s post-9/11 War on Terror.
In her search for her father, Cheryl meets John Veranda, an idealistic lawyer who gives up his family’s land, risks his marriage, and abandons aspirations for his hometown’s future for a relationship with Cheryl neither are fully prepared for.
Stuart Eisenstat, a dedicated federal bureaucrat, thinks he’s doing an old friend a favor when he picks John’s hometown as the perfect site for relocating Guantanamo detainees only to come face to face with the personal cost of America’s global ambitions.
My published short stories:
- “Saved From Future Archaeologists,” Borrowed Solace Literary Journal
- “Big Nine,” Lost River Literary Journal
- “Tracks,” St. Louis Noir, Akashic Books
- “Alp Horn,” London Journal of Fiction (inaugural print edition)
- “The Master’s Voices,” The Dos Passos Review
- “The Cigarette Bar,” published in Noir at the Bar, 2nd ed, Subterranean Books
- “Signal Point,” published in Rainbow Curve.
- “Little Egypt,” published in Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, Southeast Missouri State University.
- “American Muezzin,” published in Mizna: Arts, etc
- “Hallucination in D Minor,” published in Marginalia, Western State College of Colorado
- “Moon Dust,” published in Arabesques.
Who I review for:
- Review short story submissions for December magazine
- Past reviewer for River Styx Literary Journal
- Past reviewer for The Short Review
- Short story contest judge for St. Louis and Missouri Writers Guilds
Invited presentations and activities:
- Claremont McKenna University, Special Lecture: “Novels of the Middle East”
- Book Review at Banipal magazine
- Book event and signing, Barnes & Noble Tucson
- Book event and signing, Mostly Books Tucson
- RAWI+Mizna conference
- St. Louis Publishers Association seminar
- Lit in the Lou presentation on short stories
- Co-founder Blank Slate Press, now an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group
