About

Though a Los Angeles native, I’m a journalist and teacher coming from an international background. My father hails from South Africa, my mother, from Argentina. While he speaks to me in English, occasionally texting me and my sister home-grown puns, mom and I converse, joke-around in both English and Spanish.

I’ve always enjoyed writing and music, playing the piano and singing for the past 20 years. During high school,  I wrote and performed the music for the school plays, following suit in college as well. I’ve been lucky enough to travel extensively, toting my camera wherever I go and wherever I’ve been–be it to another country or to one of my daily walks.

(On a brief disclamatory note, I have to say there’s something inherently toolish about writing this kind of self-description. So I’ll just be honest and hope for the best.)

My journalistic passion lies in essay-writing, critical pieces and long form. In the meantime, though, I have ever continued to snap shots, write poetry, compose and perform music and keep up creative prose writing as well. I set up this site in order to consolidate my pieces into a visible portfolio while allowing space for a blog, for those works I never sent to be published and for those I’ve put together in other media I also hoped to share.

So a bit more by way of  a recent bio…

…After spending four years at UC Berkeley, where I double majored in Music and English and learned Italian along the way, I carted myself back home to L.A. And a home it truly is. I love the city’s size, its completion. It’s certainly got its problems, but while I have loved visiting many places and look forward to acquainting myself with others, this is home.

A cultivation of many interests led me to try different things following college–from playing piano for Temple Emanuel’s Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services, to tutoring high school students on the SAT and  from working for Oldies’ Radio Station K-Earth 101 as a member of its street team to taking orchestration classes at UCLA. But it was my love of people’s subtleties, their stories and of writing that led me to decide on a pursuit of journalism.

I interned at Los Angeles Magazine for three months before beginning work at the Los Angeles Times, using my arts background to better list all the classical music events, those for kids and museums as well as write briefs for the paper’s web Calendar section and that of its print edition. Knowing I wanted to be a writer but also feeling I wanted formal and academic journalistic training in all media, I decided to follow a masters degree in journalism at USC’s Annnenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

The two years were a whirlwind of industry and enrichment, finding me learning news writing and reporting, broadcast reporting and editing, online production, journalistic ethics, media history, media law, magazine writing, investigative reporting, copy editing, photojournalism, interpretive writing and arts criticism, among other things. I spent a year and a half writing often near-daily news analysis and critical pieces for Pop + Politics before joining some faculty and a few fellow graduate students in founding Annenberg’s news Web site, Neon Tommy, where I wrote a weekly column and served as the Senior Arts Editor.

Those monolithic years sandwiched a zany summer, one in which I moved back to the Bay Area, this time to San Francisco. Living in a Victorian-era house in the city’s Mission district, I spoke only Spanish in order to help immerse my host’s American four-year-old daughter in the language. As a Potrero Hill-located French Web site L’Atelier BNP Paribas intern, I covered tech industry news by writing twice-daily pieces while spending the other week days in Soma, writing blog posts, translating Spanish news briefs to English, reporting or researching as an intern at MacArthur Fellow Sandy Close-founded ethnic press site, New America Media.

Following graduation, where I was given the Annenberg “Director’s Award for Excellence,” I spent the summer as a Carnegie, Knight Foundations News 21 Multimedia Reporting Fellow. Those months saw me visiting Central American Catholic and Pentecostal churches as I explored the reasons why L.A.’s community  seem to be abandoning the first in favor of the second. Those visits resulted in hundreds of photos, hours of interviews, videos and a 5,000 word piece I divided into seven sections.

I recently discovered my enjoyment for teaching while giving a two month course on journalism to South L.A. high schoolers at the Urban Media Foundation. Much of this past Fall involved reporting a story on premature births in Los Angeles and the prenatal care women here receive for community-funded reporting non-profit, Spot.Us. I’ve contributed to The Huffington Post, The Berkeley Poetry Review, LAist, WitnessLA, TheWrap, Our Weekly, Beliefnet, The News & Observer and just had the Spanish versions of those aforementioned pieces concerning Central American Pentecostals in the city published in a three-day-front-page series in La Opinion, Los Angeles’ leading Spanish-language daily newspaper.

I spent seven wonderful weeks this Spring full-time substitute teaching 9th grade English and Creative Writing at Harvard-Westlake, my Alma mater, for my 9th grade teacher. Rereading The Odyssey for the first time in 11 years (or, ok, five, if you count that breeze review in which I had to engage to remind myself why Ulysses makes sense), I found myself on a personal odyssey of sorts–navigating the choppy, but exciting, waters of teaching high school, of volleying with bright 15-year-olds and of re-immersing myself in literature and its analysis while coming back to a sort of home/Ithaka–my middle school.

I have, in the recent past, taught English, yearbook and human development and currently freelance report and write. Come Fall 2010, I will be teaching 11th and 8th grade English full-time at The Bishop’s School.

So why “Debrief” ? Well, as I hinted before, I’m quite fond of puns, double entendres, word games and the like. One of my nicknames, Deb, fits nicely into a word that means to report and inform. As a journalist, I inform a reader, viewer or auditor of something occurring here. In terms of poetry, photography or opinionated writing, I’m debriefing a reader or listener on my singular perspective. The dissemination allows that person to make from it what s/he will while hoping that s/he will draw something positive from the experience.

I hope you enjoy perusing this space and that you’ll come back soon!

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Web site design by Deborah Stokol. Full Web site construction by Jim Wayne. Header image, Paul Klee’s “The Goldfish.” All songs recorded  in 2000 by Noah Levin. Those recorded from 2006-2007 by Jackson Jordan Cone. Those dating from 2009-2010 by Deborah Stokol.