My Story

I’ve always been curious, or nosy, depending on your point of view. Still, journalism didn’t pull me in until I was nearly 30. At that point I was a copywriter working on corporate websites, and the allure of talking up cat food and technology was beginning to wear thin. I started to do some freelance writing for a site called new2usa.com. I loved the work. A combination of interest and genes finally kicked in.

My father worked in radio at the BBC World Service for much of his career, but I wasn’t remotely interested in it growing up. TV was cool. Radio was not. Years later, I moved from London to the U.S. and came across public radio by accident. Those pieces sucked me in. I’d always loved telling stories, and the more I listened the more I wondered if I could do it for a living. I headed to London to do a journalism course in September 2001, missing the 9/11 attacks by nine hours.

Back in New York in 2002, I started badgering WNYC, my local station, about an internship. It was there I began to learn the ropes. Since then I’ve produced hundreds of news spots and scores of features for Marketplace, the public radio business show. I’ve also filed stories for NPR, WNYC, The World, and the BBC. My print pieces have appeared in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Independent, the New York Daily News, and Metro, among others.

In recent years I’ve been doing a lot of podcasting. In addition to my own show I’ve hosted a podcast series for Gimlet Creative, and one for Morgan Stanley. I currently co-host the show Let’s Find Common Ground and I spent much of 2019 working on Tight Knit, a podcast series on caregiving.

For ten years I was an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School. I taught radio storytelling skills and how to write for the ear as well as the eye. I’ve also taught podcasting at Stonybrook University.

In 2012 I went back to school myself. That spring I graduated from CUNY’s entrepreneurial journalism program, where I incubated and launched The Broad Experience, my podcast on women and the workplace. Women’s conflicted relationships with their careers intrigued me while I was at Marketplace. But for all the buzz around this topic, there wasn’t much nuance. That’s what I aimed to deliver on the podcast, which wrapped up in January 2023 after more than a decade of production. Listeners have called it “important”, “fascinating”, and “totally badass”.

I’m the product of a British father and American mother. As a result, I’m very interested in cultural differences. Our favo(u)rite family book in the ’80s was ‘Brit-Think, Ameri-Think: A Transatlantic Survival Guide’.  I still own a copy.

I used to hate my last name, but now I’m quite fond of it, hyphen and all. We’ve been through a lot together.

Photo credit: Regan Kelly