About Arlene
“I am not a one-genre writer.”
“I don’t fit in one box, one category, or one lane. If a thought sparks an idea, I run with it. That’s who I am. That’s what I do. That’s what fuels every book I write.”
The teacher
Forty-one years at the front of the room
Arlene grew up in Los Angeles, in an experimental public school program that taught by doing, with hands-on, experiential learning from kindergarten through high school. She never forgot what it felt like to learn that way.
Over four decades she taught everyone from preschoolers to college students. As an ESOL instructor for Newton County Schools in Georgia, she wrote the district’s first ESOL curriculum, pre-K through twelfth grade, for students arriving from all over the world. In 2002 she founded Chrysalis Experiential Academy in Roswell, Georgia, a school for students who didn’t fit the traditional mold. She wrote every curriculum, trained every teacher, and earned full accreditation within three years. For twenty years she also trained Georgia’s teachers as a staff development provider for the state.
Along the way she earned an M.Ed. and a Ph.D. from Georgia State University and published Rekindling the Love of Learning, her case for experiential education.
The survivor
Woke at sixty
At sixty, a sudden medical crisis put Arlene into a medically induced coma. Her doctors gave her a four percent chance of survival. She survived, and within eleven days she was learning to walk again.
Recovery brought something else to the surface: a sexual assault her mind had buried for decades. She faced it, and eventually wrote about all of it, the coma, the paralysis, the trauma, and the faith and forgiveness that followed, in her memoir Woke at 60. She calls it the moment she woke into her true voice.
“I’ve survived things that should have ended me. I’ve reinvented myself more times than I can count.”
The writer
The Rebel Writer™
Arlene writes psychological thrillers and political sci-fi, historical fiction and Southern humor, memoir, and children’s stories. What ties it together is the voice: short sentences, hard truths, and a teacher’s refusal to let anyone stop thinking.
She put it this way when she claimed the name:
“So this new identity isn’t a costume. It’s a declaration.
I write because stories change people… and people change the world.
If my words help even one teacher breathe deeper, one student find courage, one reader see themselves differently, one leader understand what humanity truly requires… then my rebellion is worth it.”
Today
Writing from Tallapoosa, Georgia
Retired from teaching, consulting, and the speaking circuit, Arlene now writes full time on a small farm in Tallapoosa, Georgia. She writes fast: her series on drafting a novel in ninety days is subtitled “25 times and counting.”
She is a parent and a grandmother.
Agents, editors, readers: let’s talk.
Request a manuscript, set up an interview, or simply say hello.