I am a semi-retired writer and poet. I am taking an extended leave from publishing to focus on raising my young sons with my co-parent and to heal from dealing with a malicious and delusional stalker who is a male speculative fiction author, who became obsessively jealous of me after I started getting published in mid 2022 and quickly earned a major award nomination. After ending our friendship, he chaotically and repeatedly attempted to coerce me into a romantic relationship (and was rejected) in order to legitimize his behavior and fuel his addictions, and then he started building his career by plagiarizing my knowledge/identity, and writing and publishing explicit, exploitative fiction about me, stories I directly told him to stop writing.

This has been especially traumatizing and devastating for me, my family, and my life as a survivor of severe childhood sexual abuse and as a 20+ year activist in the sexual and gender-based violence and child abuse prevention fields, as well as a community worker and anti-oppression educator in multiple social justice organizations. Important moments from my career include teaching over 5000 K-12 students about various forms of child abuse and healthy relationships, working as a medical advocate in the ER with pediatric and adult victims of sexual assault to provide compassionate support and education, volunteering with refugees and sex trafficking survivors, training as part of a city-wide coalition for mass casualty response, and lobbying Congress in Washington, DC to expand nature access and environmental equity to youth across the US and protect public lands. My life has been about making the world a better, more equitable place.

Many people across all facets of my life have been supporting me through this situation since early 2023 including my co-parent, friends, family, writing community, supervisors, co-workers, anti-oppression mentors, teachers, classmates, therapists, peer survivor support, and others. The only appropriate action for this author to take is to pull his work from publishers, short and long form, and attend long-term sex addiction/erotomania treatment, plus related treatment for substance use disorder and possible personality disorders. He will not, because he is a profound level of coward. But his sexual harassment and serial violations have made it impossible for me to stay in publishing. Congratulations to this liberal incel. He gets the Hollywood ending of his dreams: he’s a sex pest like so many other men in the arts world. Out of all the lives one could choose for themselves, he chose this.

May everyone else be better than that guy.

If you are interested in my work, my more readily available poems were published with Strange Horizons, Small Wonders, Haven Speculative, and Moss Puppy. I also have a short story in the trans/gnc new weird horror anthology Your Body is Not Your Body from Tenebrous Press and a story in the out-of-print Sapphic horror anthology Moonflowers & Nightshade. I have additionally been fortunate to share paneling tables with my local HWA members and be a performance poet and featured reader with a number of great organizations.

Thank you to every publisher and reader who has given me a chance.

I am sorry I couldn’t share more of my writing and performances, but I need to protect myself (and my children) from his ongoing plagiarism, exploitation, and stalking as this is continuing to cause Complex PTSD symptoms and affect my and my family’s life and livelihood. I know my artistic work, life stories, and insights on trauma and healing have been genuinely meaningful and supportive to many people. I am grateful to have been able to share what I could and to have had incredible community with so many amazing artists who choose to do good in the world.