I’m a really good liar. I’ve been like this since I was a painfully shy child. I mean, who would ever guess that a chubby, awkward kid would lie? And yet, I had my entire third-grade class convinced that my parents were hippies, and we lived in a school bus. We did not. We lived in a fairly decent house in the Hollywood Hills. Although it seemed as if I lived a perfectly charmed existence. I did not. My house was filled with secrets. And I perpetuated those secrets by telling stories.

These stories had deeply human characters: a Gen X with a drinking problem about to lose his job, an undertaker desperate for love, a comedian whose cheating husband threatens her career, a queer teen fighting for gender-neutral clothing. They’re ordinary people with urgent dreams, navigating life’s curveballs with resilience, questionable decisions, and a sense of humor. Yet these characters, deep down, are ordinary, flawed people whose deep-rooted dreams give them a sense of purpose.

I consider myself a master of dialogue, subtext, and tension building. My writing often has a recurring theme of gender empowerment, and I’ve deduced that there are infinite ways stories that inspire gender empowerment can be told, and need to be told, until all of us are equal. My writing is also about the struggles we have faced historically. From them, we can see how far we’ve come, and how far we still need to go.

I don’t lie anymore, I tell stories. My writing and artistic goal is to trust that what I know and what I have to say through storytelling is within me, to listen to the world around me, and to add my take on universal truths through the medium of playwriting.