• The Color of Cancer: Time for a Change

    In New York City, where I live, life-expectancy is 3 years shorter for Black people than the average and cancer is the leading cause of premature death – according to the City’s Vital Statistics records in their most recent summary. Too many Black lives are cut short by cancer, documented by me and many others over the years in…

  • Audiobook release of Mosquito Song: Dreams in Old San Juan

    My new short fiction audiobook is out now and free US review copies are available in a limited number.

  • Love of the Irish: St. Patrick’s Day Reflections

    A Personal St. Patrick’s Day Planning Cycle St. Patrick’s Day Plan 1. The most obvious plan is to drink. I am part Irish according to ancestry.com, a lot of people in the town (hamlet, really) where I grew up in were Irish, including my first boyfriend. And I always have a Guinness on St. Patrick’s…

  • How Not to Die of Lung Cancer

    Quitting smoking is only part of the solution. The day we found out my father had lung cancer, a neighbor had come by my childhood home upstate, but no one answered the door. The neighbor went on inside and looked around – none of us locked our doors out there in the country at the…

  • Good Neighbors

    A Christmas Story, excerpt from Death and the Dream. After Christmas my Aunt Muriel and I walk through the barren park on East Fifth Street in New York. It’s not much of a park. We have to stop every six feet or so beside one of the rotting wooden benches to let my Aunt Muriel…

  • Stream and Shale

    (Excerpt from my book, Stream and Shale.) 6AM. At the journey’s beginning, stars still shine brightly in the dark blue sky. It’s below freezing. We gather on a Brooklyn street corner and wait for the bus going to a Citizens Tour of Pennsylvania arranged by Brooklyn for Peace. Each person carries a few gallons of…

  • My Mother, My Daughters, and Breast Cancer

    Genes cause cancer. But genes do not necessarily cause death from cancer. Breast Cancer Awareness Month is a time of both hope and remembrance for me. Hope for a better future, and remembrance for my Mother. She died suddenly of metastatic breast cancer at about the time I was going to deliver my second baby daughter.…

  • About that vaccine…

    I got my second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in New York City on Saturday, an emotional experience. It was at one of the NYC vaccine hubs called PODs, set up by the Health Department. I had been working for 12 hour shifts once a week to help get New Yorkers vaccinated. The PODs…

  • Veterans and my novel, Brindle 24

    Norman Brown, the author’s father was a veteran of WW2.