about the author

the basics:

• Benedict Arnold, Albert Schweitzer and I were all born on January 14
• I grew up in Chicago on the northwest side
  (Irving Park Road and Lincoln Avenue, or 3500 North/4000 West, for those in the know)
• I am agnostic, or you can call me an infidel if that suits you better.
• My favorite Monty Python sketch is “The Argument Clinic.”
• My family background is working-class; my father (raised in Italy) was a cook and my mother a waitress.
• I worked my way through undergraduate (University of Illinois, Chicago) and graduate school.
• I have a PhD in linguistics (Princeton *87).
• From Princeton I went west. I taught for ten years at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
• My favorite course to teach was Introduction to Linguistics, with Language & Discrimination as a close second.
• I take language rights very seriously. On occasion I have appeared as an expert witness in language-focused discrimination cases.
• I left academia in 1999 and have been writing fiction full time since that point.
• I have eight novels and a handful of short stories in print.
• I write under more than one name.
• My first novel won the PEN/Hemingway award.
• More information about my fiction, novels in print, etc, on my author weblog
• Other bits and pieces to read, fiction and non-fiction, at Scribd.
• I have a husband (the Mathematician), a grown daughter (still known as the Girlchild), and two dogs.
• When I’m not writing, I’m probably reading politics someplace on the internet, in the garden with the dogs, or working on various mixed media textile projects.
• There’s a longer narrative bio here.

I am writing a revised second edition of English as an Accent for Routledge, and I am always interested in hearing stories of everyday encounters with discrimination based on language or accent. Please feel free to contact me.

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself. (Noam Chomsky)

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