About

I started out as a writer in Prague, just after the fall of communism, lived through San Francisco’s dotcom boom and bust and then landed up in post-apartheid Johannesburg. Like so many others, my life upended when Covid hit. These days, I split my time between South Africa and California, editing, coaching writers and advising nonprofits and independent media on communications strategy and storytelling.

Over the last 30 years I’ve worked in mission-driven media and publishing as a narrative nonfiction editor, a newsroom leader and longform writer and essayist.

As executive editor of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, which was one of the continent’s most respected investigative and cultural publications, I spent seven years working with the country’s finest writers, journalists and public intellectuals on everything from personal essays and narrative nonfiction to book projects. As nonfiction editor with Pan Macmillan South Africa and an independent book doctor, I’ve done everything from manuscript review to developmental and line editing for books by leading intellectuals, journalists and biographers.

Later, as managing editor of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, I oversaw a team of editors and contributors across the world and directed content in more than a dozen languages, building the editorial strategy and production systems for what is now considered the gold standard for “how to” investigative journalism.

Along the way, some of my projects have included co-editing two books on migration and African cities, including a collection of literary nonfiction by some of South Africa’s leading writers and researchers, Writing Invisibility (Mail & Guardian), and the oral history collection, I Want To Go Home Forever (Wits University Press) with migration scholar Loren Landau. One of those oral histories, about the death of a boy in Soweto which sparked a wave of xenophobic violence across South Africa, inspired the six-part podcast and longform narrative, One Night in Snake Park, which I created, co-wrote, edited and managed. 

I’ve also taught digital storytelling, narrative nonfiction and media ethics at two of South Africa’s top universities, won three major journalism awards and was a media fellow at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. I hold an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco and a BA in journalism from San Diego State University.