Personal writing

In addition to working full time as a writer and content strategist, I write for myself, too. Explore some of my work below.

A Woman Called Cecil

In 2012, my work as a research assistant introduced me to a long-forgotten World War I correspondent named Cecil Inslee Dorrian. Cecil—her words, her magnetism, her sheer force of will—grabbed me that day in the dusty archive, and she hasn’t let me go since. She worked as the primary European correspondent for the Newark Evening News, one of the largest daily newspapers on the East Coast at the time, which saw her trudging through trenches and dodging debris from air raids all over the Western Front.

These feats alone are remarkable; the fact that she was one of only a handful of women to accomplish them is even more so. And Cecil did it all with a singular determination to be heard. I fell in love with her way back then and promised that I would tell her story someday. I began working on a manuscript, tentatively titled A Woman Called Cecil, about Cecil’s life and what she has meant to me, in the MA in Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University.