DAVIDA SIWISA JAMES lived in Morningside Heights as a child and Sugar Hill as a young woman. She has a BA in English from UCLA and attended Penn State Dickinson Law in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She has been a university public relations director, a freelance journalist for the twice Pulitzer Prize-winning Virgin Islands Daily News, and has a twenty-year management career in performing arts finance and marketing. She has published nonfiction books, essays, poems, a play, and an award-winning short story, "The Commute." She resides in Los Angeles, CA.