I am the author of Road to Nowhere: How A Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. Road to Nowhere is about something that never quite happened: an unfinished interstate highway through Black West Baltimore. More than that, it is about the people and communities in the expressway’s path, and about the enormous harm a map alone can do.
I have an undergraduate degree in U.S. History from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and a PhD in U.S. History from Columbia University in New York. For a long time, I taught history and urban studies at Seattle University; now I write about global health and climate change for a living at Derfner & Sons. I am also studying to be an archivist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Information School.
I research and write about twentieth-century American cities and neighborhoods, and about all the things that carved them apart—from segregated schools to urban renewal programs to real-estate speculation to transportation planning—and pulled them together. I am working on a new book, tentatively titled Save Our City, about the exclusionary histories of historic preservation in Seattle and other American cities.
I live in an old-ish house in a new-ish city with my husband and the best dog in the world.
