Born in Boston with the accent to prove it, Risa lived within ten miles of that city for decades until a recent move to the neighboring Ocean State.
For many years, Risa worked in a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting active participation in our democracy, with a special focus on voting and elections.
Risa’s creative writing journey started the day she found three pennies in a neat stack on a windowsill in a completely empty apartment that had belonged to her mother. It’s an interesting story, and there was definitely some magic in those pennies.
When not writing, Risa is reading, exercising or doing therapeutic ironing (yes, there is such a thing.)
For the first fifteen years after I left university, I put in the hard slog. I had an ordinary job, a predictable salary and a hefty mortgage. I lived near London. Culture and pollution oozed out of every pore of the magnificent capital in equal measure, and I loved the challenges, the pace and the variety of that chapter of my life.
But then I had a family, and my entire perspective transformed. I moved to the East Coast of Australia and went from scraping ice off my windscreen to wiping sweat from my face at Christmas time. To start with, I was completely disorientated, but now I’m at home, writing books in paradise.
That sea change inspired my first novel, ‘Universal Values’.
The process of deciding to move, and the complete metamorphosis i
