I grew up in New Jersey and completed my Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at Columbia University in New York City. After fifteen years as a university professor, I left teaching to spend more time on other pursuits, including writing young adult fiction. My lifelong interest in languages, cultures, history and social justice is reflected in the stories I tell.

When I’m not writing, I enjoy studying Japanese, fitness training (I’m a former non-competitive gymnast) and travel, especially when it involves art museums, historical walking tours (the London Beatles tour was a favorite), bookstores and great vegan restaurants. I live with my husband, Rob, in Vancouver, Canada.

More About Me and Girl on the Wire

Like my main character Cleo, I grew up Greek-American (and in my case, a few other ethnicities too) in northern New Jersey. There was Greek food, Greek church on occasion, Greek music and dancing. In the photo to the left, my cousin Liz and I are trying out our Greek dance moves. I’m the girl in the period A-line dress on the left.

Because of my Greek background and my love of cultural anthropology, I decided to set my current novel, Girl on the Wire, in Greece. I read about Greek history, searching for a period and event that interested me, and landed on the 1973 sit-in at the Polytechnic, which is the University of Athens’s engineering school. I also read up on ancient Greek democracy, and the character of Zander was born. 

Although I’m too young to remember the Polytechnic uprising or to have been there, I drew on my personal experiences of Greece for other elements in the story. 

My father’s dad, Petros Perimenis, was a two-time mayor of Nea Smyrni, which is the Athens’s suburb where Cleo lives in her parents’ apartment. (Like Cleo, my dad and his two siblings owned apartments in the same building on the site of the house where they grew up.) In the photo on the right, my grandfather Petros, as mayor, greets Lady Bird Johnson with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson (far left) looking on in August 1962. Johnson made a tour of Greece, Italy and countries in the Middle East on behalf of President Kennedy in order to shore up America’s influence and support as a bulwark against Russian communism during the Cold War. In 1973, when my novel is set, America’s tug of war with Russia over who would hold sway in Greece is one of the main reasons the US government at the time did not denounce the Colonels and Greece’s dictatorship.

Cleo’s description of the photo of her dad as a teen dancing the jitterbug with his friend before he immigrated to America derives from a photo of my father doing just that in the 1950s. My dad is the dancer on the left. In terms of culture, my Greek uncle in Nea Smyrni once pointed out to my mother (who was not Greek) and me that we were arguing too quietly and should raise our voices and dramatically wave our arms in the air when we disagree. I also drew on my own experiences of being approached by aggressive men on the streets of Athens when I was a teenager, which happens to Cleo too.

Other elements in the novel are true. The Kyttaro Live Club was a popular Athens concert venue in 1973 and still is. The Clockwork Orange bookstore really did host underground student gatherings like the one in my story. The book Cleo reads, Eighteen Texts, with its short story, The Plaster Cast, was published in Greece in 1967. Its veiled criticism of the dictatorship flew under the radar of the Colonels’ censors and the book sold out immediately.

On the Greek island of Hydra, there really is a rock kids jump off near the harbor, which I photographed on my trip to Greece in 2019.

While I’m not sure about an ice cream café on Hydra’s harbor in 1973, I drew on my own ice cream experience from the same trip. And yes, the ice cream was as delicious as it looks.

Cleo is fictional, but everything else in Girl on the Wire that happens at the sit-in is historically accurate: students painted slogans on buses, a woman named Maria Damanaki was one of the announcers at the student radio station, and a male student announcer did calmly recite the Greek national anthem when an armored tank crashed through the gate of the Polytechnic. Twenty-four people were really killed.

I couldn’t have written this novel without Kostis Kornetis’s excellent book, Children of the Dictatorship, which provided me, a non-Greek speaker, with so many helpful details on the Polytechnic sit-in and the period in English.

Note: The photograph on the banner at the top of this website’s page is of students protesting at the Polytechnic sit-in of 1973. The Greek word they display is Eleftheria, Freedom!