About Carrie

In No Way to Fall Off This Earth, a principal in Brooklyn goes to India to search for two missing students only to grapple with the consequences of finding them.

Amala and Zahrah Khadim, the twin sisters in No Way to Fall Off This Earth, were inspired by twins who were on the roster of the middle school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn where I was the Assistant Principal. One of my responsibilities was to make sure that students who were called “no shows” were discharged from our school, but students may not be discharged from a New York City school’s roster until there is proof that they have either moved or are going to school elsewhere. The twins proved to be a more difficult case, until we found out their father had taken them out of the country. I continued to wonder about them, until I had to write this imagined account of what happened next. I set the story in India, because I'd fallen in love with the country, the culture, and the people when I spent time there as part of my previous role as a corporate trainer.

Gwen Ellis, principal and founder of The Young Women’s Engineering Academy in downtown Brooklyn, rolled with her palm the orange languishing on her desk for the last three days. The orange was there because of Zahrah. Two years earlier, when she was in sixth grade and in Gwen’s office once again, silent once again, she plucked an orange off Gwen’s desk and started peeling it, eating each slice, then offering Gwen the last one as if it had been hers all along.

While this story is fiction, I was interested in exploring the impact of the wars overseas on the people left behind in smaller American cities and towns. I set the story in Watertown, New York, where my father grew up and where my uncle and grandfather owned a shoe store like the one in the book. It experienced a twenty-year decline and now sits vacant in the once budding downtown. I spent my summers in the shoe store and Jewish holidays in their modest synagogue, where I was fascinated by the soldiers from nearby Fort Drum who would sometimes join us for services.

Jodi stands accused of sexually assaulting her fifteen-year-old daughter’s boyfriend, Rafael.

Though Jodi is unnerved that her studious and responsible daughter has kept her boyfriend a secret, she finds herself forming a friendship with him. Their relationship escalates as do their secrets and confidences until the day a police officer arrives to arrest Jodi. Alvaro, Jodi’s husband, and Miranda end up at odds as they grapple with understanding the wife and mother they thought they knew.

Meanwhile, Rafael, reeling from missing his estranged father and broken-hearted after a relationship gone wrong with his former English teacher, isn’t sure who he can trust and what kind of justice he seeks.

Jodi feels as trapped by her ankle monitor as she always has by her troubled past, and she’s failing to find answers for the husband and daughter she adores. Fearing a trial could never expose the whole truth, Jodi tries to take matters into her own hands with Rafael at the run-down motel where she has been living. But she’s failed to realize how much he’s willing to sacrifice now that he feels he has nothing left.

This novel is based on a story I heard from my hometown where a woman was put in jail for sexually assaulting her daughter’s boyfriend. What intrigued me the most was that the woman’s husband and daughter stood by her, while her family of origin shunned her. This started all sorts of questions about innocence, identity, sexuality, love, and forgiveness that are explored in this story.

Also, as with my previous novel, No Way to Fall Off This Earth, I'm inspired by my work in the New York City public schools to explore the unique relationships that can develop between adults and adolescents.

He shrugged and backed away, not closing the front door when he left. He hopped over the porch steps and veered off to the right, slapping the tall bush with his palm as he crossed our narrow strip of lawn. Before stepping onto the sidewalk, he turned to where I stood in the open door and nodded, like he was saying yes to a question I hadn’t asked.

My reading of an excerpt at 'Stories on Stage'

An artist, Justin, moves to Western Minnesota from Brooklyn to work on his art in peace and solitude. But when a dog comes up to his art studio and leads Justin to his front lawn, the discovery he makes there won't allow him to go back to the solitary life he thought he wanted.

Set in 1956, and told from the perspective of a young boy who witnesses the sudden death of his father, this story examines the ways tragic death can become a shadow over the living.

Nate, or Shankar, as he calls himself at the ashram where he lives near Boulder, Colorado, goes home for a family funeral and must face the ways in which his spiritual practice doesn't hold up under pressure.

When JT, a former actress, develops a crush on a young playwright, her family life, her marriage, and her aspirations are thrown into question.

A grieving woman willfully misses her husband's funeral, instead revisiting the place where she met a man decades earlier.

This is a piece of flash fiction about a woman on the edge selling a haunted doll (or is it?).

This is a piece of flash fiction which explores a moment in time between two women, one who is ostensibly helping the other to her feet, while it might be the other way around.

While running on the trails, Brooke has an accident and encounters Dustin, a man living in the mountains, and their interaction helps her come to terms with all she loves and hates about her life.

When Theresa loses her father, she flies across the country to see her mother from whom she’s been estranged for as long as she can remember. In the confines of their Upper East Side apartment, the assumptions she’s always held true about her mother slip away in the face of grief, even as both she and her mother fear letting go of the way things have always been between them.

Fiona, a cynical young woman, sits in a Denver bar late at night with her husband Ryan. She has a strange, ghostly encounter with Maggie, another patron at the bar, who tells stories of her youth in Manhattan in the 1980s and reveals a secret that changes everything for Fiona.

In front of an ex-pat bar in Agra, Banhi meets Amber. Banhi sees an opportunity to save herself and her children, but her plan goes awry when Amber isn’t quite who she seems.

A young woman, Viv, goes to a resort in Mexico with her boyfriend and her curiosity about the abundance of Sargassum leads her to unexpected discoveries.

Ashley, fifteen, seeks adventure one hot summer day when she and a friend wander from their Upper East Side neighborhood to Spanish Harlem. She finds unexpected first love, but must contend with the consequences of seeing the truth for the first time about privilege and racial disparity.

A school fundraiser and a series of white lies collide in this story where the character of Nora is made to look more closely at the charged relationship with her best friend.