Award-winning columns & feature stories:

Hoop Dreams:  I started playing basketball in red Converse and pigtails with aspirations to someday play at the college level. I never considered the WNBA because it wasn’t available for wishful thinking. 

Domestic Violence:   One day she wears a red dress that makes him angry. He thinks she looks like a whore in the dress and tells her so. And he treats her like one. He’s disrespectful and rough and demeaning. 

Battling AIDS:  A rape victim gets HIV. “I was raped and I got AIDS. It’s still hard to digest that. It’s so huge. But by now, I’ve been HIV positive longer than I haven’t.” 

The Baltimore Sun:

Indian Wedding: How utterly boring our country would be if we were all the same shade, creed, race and religion. Uniformity is predictable and dull. It’s the variety of people and customs and cultures that breathe life and color into the quotidian.

College Basketball: It’s taken until now, until this current NCAA basketball tournament, for me to feel the stir of interest in the sport again. And it all has to do with the heart and hustle of the Lady Terps and their mighty, hard-won climb to the Final Four. They yanked me off the sidelines in spite of myself.

The Las Vegas Review Journal:

Childhood Obesity: A Family Affair: Until recently, the overweight parents didn’t think much about the food they offered their kids: mounds of mashed potatoes, triple-decker sandwiches and always cakes, brownies, pies or ice cream. Now, their 12-year-old daughter is twice the size she should be. 

Tiger Attack: Roy Horn mauled during performance of Siegfried & Roy. Surgeons set to remove part of Horn’s skull. 

Love Letters: Mom facing risky surgery fills family journal with advice and love.

Baby Needs a New Heart: Family struggles as pediatric cardiac surgeons leave the region in the midst of a medical malpractice crisis. 

Tattoo: Piercing and body ink enthusiast with forked tongue seeks more surgery. Few doctors willing to fulfill odd requests. 

The Tahoe World Newspaper:

Local Bear Loves Butterfingers: Bear sweet on candy breaks into VW bus for box of treats.

Get Fit, Lose Fat: Get naked. Stand in front of the mirror and shake, shake, shake. Whatever jiggles is fat. Time to lose it.