Author, Adventure Bicyclist, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Reporter
Greetings: Well, one activity we could still safely engage in during yet another odd-usual year of 2021 was bicycling. So, pedal we did. Don and I packed up our panniers in late August and departed for the exotic Midwest and
My tired brain was bursting with a jumble of nouns, adjectives and verbs when I rolled into tiny Walnut, Kansas on my bicycle late on a long-ago October afternoon. Per usual, I made a beeline for the library, intent on
Hey, lookie here! Next Avenue , a Twin Cities PBS news outlet, just published my essay/science piece about how decades of melanoma research helped advance the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Is a melanoma vaccine still on the horizon? Find out
“What a journey—a transcontinental chronicle from a writer who is truly, fully alive!”
--environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben is just one luminary with high praise for my new book Outpedaling ‘The Big C’ My Healing Cycle Across America. I know it will inspire you, too. As an award-winning reporter, I’m accustomed to interviewing sources from all walks of life. Being brave enough to write about the 4,250-mile solo cycle I embarked on to celebrate being five years cancer-free forced me to turn the spotlight on myself. My memoir not only delves into my own intensive, 11-year odyssey with melanoma, but reveals how I rediscovered my father—who died of the same type of cancer when he was 44 and I was 15. Don’t despair. This is not a boo-hoo story. It’s a frank, unsentimental and engaging tale about human connections and why I had to unearth my past to make sense of my present.