Deb writes for adults and children, and is also an editor and photographer.
Her short fiction and reviews have appeared in Threepenny Review, The Boston Sunday Globe, Seventeen, Washington Post Book World, The Chicago Sun-Times, Stories, Cicada, The Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, Bloomsbury Review, The Boston Review, and other publications.
Her photography has appeared in The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas, The Griffin Museum of Photography, The Somerville Windows Art Project, and several of her own books.
She earned a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. She has taught writing and literature at Emerson College and Western New England College, and was a Visiting Writer in Lesley University's MFA in Writing for Young People program.
Deb is a regular faculty presenter at retreats and conferences, as both author and editor, including Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators' weekends in Alaska, Arizona, Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin as well as events for the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Maine State Writers Alliance, The Pacific Coast Children's Writers and Illustrators Workshop, the Women's National Book Association (WNBA), Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), Writers Web New England, and others. In September 2007, Deb was honored as one of the Boston Public Library's Literary Lights for Children.
Born in California, Deb spent her early years as a "military brat," living also in Maryland,
Virginia, and Massachusetts. Over the years she's worked all manner of day jobs to support the fiction writing habit -- from bartender
and book reviewer to children's book editor and zookeeper. She's proud to report she's the only person
she knows who's been bitten by a dwarf lemur. "Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey were my idols growing up, and if I had another life to live (I imagine
it often, this parallel life), I'd be a field biologist or trek around photographing invertebrates
for National Geographic. I wanted rugged adventure, a wild and rambling, get-dirty sort of life,
but for a lot of years I ended up in a fairly settled way instead, raising a family I cherish and making up
stories in my pajamas. Nature and restlessness cropped up often in my writing as favorite themes though, and reading and writing continue to be the adventure of a lifetime." (See Deb's interview on
alright, i'm wrong for more on this "parallel life" stuff.)
Deb lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with her husband and their two children, Clyde and Michaela. She's at work on several new projects, including another adult historical novel.