About me

I’m a writer, doula and herbalist interested in complex truths, the nature of power, and the intimate experiences that shape us: love, motherhood, grief, healing, and our relationship with the natural world.

I came to this work after spending more than a decade confronting oppressive systems. I graduated from Harvard Law School and built a career in civil rights, working with survivors of sexual violence, challenging institutions, and advancing changes in law and policy intended to empower people who had been harmed. At the same time, I pursued justice for myself as a survivor through nearly every kind of adjudicatory body available: a university, the criminal legal system, federal civil-rights processes, and finally the vast and unruly court of public opinion when I shared my story in the film The Hunting Ground. I learned a great deal about power during this time: how it reproduces itself not just through overt domination, but through institutions and cultural narratives and—most insidiously—through its ability to capture the attention and imagination of those resisting it.

At some point, I realized I didn’t want the systems I was fighting to remain the organizing principle of my life, even in opposition. I began turning my attention away from what I wanted to destroy and toward what I wanted to build.

So I returned to writing as a creative practice rather than a form of protest. I also spent a year training as a doula with a rich community of midwives and birth workers at Kindred Space in Los Angeles, and devoted years to deepening my practice with plants and herbal medicine. Through herbalism, I share what my relationship with plants has taught me about beauty, restoration, and our connection with the earth. In my doula work, I support people through the profound transformations of birth and postpartum. And I write memoir, personal essays, and short stories, following the same impulse toward freedom that has shaped my life’s work.