Nowhere Else I Want to Be is a memoir about ten of my seventeen years as Founding Executive Director at Miriam's House -- a residence for Washington, DC's homeless women living with AIDS.

A story about me, of course, but equally about the women with whom I lived and worked, Nowhere Else I Want to Be gives readers a glimpse into the mundane, hilarious, tragic, sometimes chaotic, usually interesting life in our small community.

You will meet Valeria, strutting around the dining room in a red dress, blond wig and precariously high heels, calling herself Sha-nay-nay and tossing around Attitude with a cobra whip of her neck. And there's Sasha, who thoughtfully decided to give us all Christmas gifts, but shoplifted instead of purchased them and ended up in jail. Crystal died alone in the hospital one weekend that I was off duty, blind and alone and afraid of the dark. Alyssa, dying just after her 25th birthday, would not, until her last breath, stop reaching out for the mother who never came: the mother who had prostituted Alyssa when she was only 12 years old.

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