Jennifer is currently seeking agent representation

The Butterfly Artist

In the Dutch Golden Age, a woman artist obsessed with metamorphosis makes a perilous, unescorted journey from Amsterdam to the rainforest of Suriname to document the lifecycles of exotic butterflies for a book she hopes will establish her rightful place in an exclusive community of male scientists, but she is unprepared for the harsh environment, the brutality of the sugar economy, and the threats to her life and the life of her daughter she encounters.

THE BUTTERFLY ARTIST is inspired by the true story of Maria Sibylla Merian, a seventeenth-century single mother, painter, and butterfly expert who was the first ecologist and the first woman to travel to distant lands in the name of science. An excerpt from The Butterfly Artist was shortlisted for Uncharted Magazine’s historical fiction challenge and longlisted for Uncharted Magazine’s novel excerpt contest. The opening pages were ranked in the top ten percent of over 700 entries in this year’s Exeter Novel Prize.

Fleeing an abusive husband and witchcraft rumors, Maria takes her daughters from a cultlike religious community to Amsterdam. There she struggles to support her daughters while also making a name for herself as an artist and butterfly expert. Maria is not only driven by a desire for recognition. Her obsession with metamorphosis fulfills a deep need she cannot explain and drives her to take dangerous risks. When a male scientist passes off her work as his own, Maria and her youngest daughter do the unthinkable. They travel unescorted across the ocean to the wilds of Suriname to research a book that will prove her worth. But the English apothecary Hans Sloane is working on a similar project. Aided by two women, one indigenous and the other African, Maria and her daughter race to find the caterpillars and butterflies needed to complete her book before Sloane’s appears. On an expedition upriver, Maria falls ill with fever and encounters hostility from unexpected quarters. The completion of the book is threatened, Maria’s relationship with her daughter falters, and the survival of the women is at stake.

Told from dual points of view (Maria’s and her younger daughter’s), THE BUTTERFLY ARTIST explores themes that will resonate today: The struggles faced by women of a certain age when their obsessions go against societal norms; the difficulty of balancing ambition and motherhood; daughters breaking free of a mother’s influence; the relationships between art, science and colonial oppression; and the necessity that women choose their own values and find their own voices.

The Butterfly Artist was shortlisted for Uncharted Magazine’s Historical Fiction Challenge, 2025 and longlisted for Uncharted Magazine’s novel excerpt contest, 2026. The opening pages were ranked in the top ten percent of over 700 entries in the 2026 Exeter Novel Prize.

Readers of Lauren Groff’s Matrix: A Novel, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, Lily King’s Euphoria, Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things will love this book.

Myths andMigrations

The remote northwest of nineteenth-century Iceland is no place for Helga, a free-thinking little girl who yearns to read, write stories, and escape a life bound by tradition. Helga lives with eight others in a tiny one room cottage. Hard labor gets them through freezing winters and demanding summers. Despite a psychologically abusive father and harsh physical conditions, the precocious young Helga finds solace in the love of her twin sister Inga and the encouragement of her mother who teaches her to find strength in the adventures of strong Icelandic goddesses.

When she is only seven, Helga’s beloved mother dies, leaving her a message she’ll never forget in a bound book of blank pages: Create your own life. Fly like a bird escaping winter. Soon after her mother’s death, Helga’s father who has taken up with the housemaid and fathered another child, sends her away from her twin to live alone as a pauper on a distant farm. Thus begins a physical, emotional, and intellectual journey in which Helga fights not only for survival, but for liberty of thought and choice.

Once out of servitude, Helga travels from Iceland to a pioneer community in the Dakota Territory, and eventually to Seattle. She records her story in the book her mother gave her as she leaves the familiar behind, time and again, for a better, freer existence. She becomes a mother and a writer, suffers devastating heartbreak, finds more than one kind of love, learns a profound appreciation of the natural world – birds, especially -- faces numerous brushes with death, and ultimately is embroiled in a life-changing battle over the position of women vs. the ideas of men and the church.

A poignant, atmospheric story with strong book-club appeal, MIGRATIONS is the first in a potential trilogy tracing three generations of women, akin to Jane Smiley’s The Last Hundred Years Trilogy. Comparable to BURIAL RITES by Hannah Kent, THE THIRTEENTH TALE by Diane Setterfield, and Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s THE MERCIES with vivid tones of Annie Proulx, MIGRATIONS explores how the power of having choice and vesting change can lead to transformative self-discoveries as Helga travels from desolation to the place she really belongs.