Currently seeking representation.

The City Lies Before Us follows four generations of two interconnected families, one Black and one White, as they navigate a rapidly modernizing New York City. From the War of 1812 through the Civil War, each of its six chapters centers a different family member negotiating challenges both classic and modern: shifting illusions of freedom, achieved and thwarted ambitions, realized and unrequited loves, violent and natural deaths. Like Homegoing and Pachinko, my 90,000 word historical novel is told from the perspective of traditionally marginalized people determined to assert power in the face of patriarchy, generational trauma, persistent discrimination, and repressive cultural mores. 

Set against the vanishing backdrop of Spingler’s Farm and what it would eventually become—New York’s Union Square—we come to understand how the space's transition from bucolic private farm to contested center of urban wealth and power is the very birth of the modern American city. It’s where city blocks subsume farms. Slavery turns to segregation. Class warfare rages. And our protagonists find purpose as they cross paths amidst this tidal wave of change.

It opens with Philis, enslaved on the Spinglers' twenty-two-acre farm in a still rural section of Manhattan. When she learns that Mary Spingler is reneging on a deal they’d struck to free her and her daughter Ona, the consequences are swift, severe, deadly, and reverberate through the lives of both families’ descendants for the next fifty years. The novel ends with Philis’s great grandson receiving his regimental colors in Union Square as he's about to march off to war. He's cheered by his parents and the Spingler’s descendants, as the two families have remained connected long past Philis's eventual manumission. He too expects the fulfillment of a promise, except this one is on a national scale. It's the guarantee of citizenship and equality before the law. 

The City Lies Before Us grew out of many years studying the history of New York City, and Union Square specifically. During my MA in Public History at NYU, I thought about how best to bring these rich stories to life, novelization always top of mind. Continuing research for my Ph.D. at UMass Amherst, I discovered a wealth of fascinating voices long suppressed, further convinced that I wanted to bring these meaningful stories to a wider audience

I’m excited to share The City Lies Before Us with the world, for it transcends time and place to reveal how finding power at the margins is as quintessential to claiming one’s humanity, as it is to the modern city itself.