In 2011, I left my government job in Washington D.C. and moved to the Turks & Caicos Islands. The move had been a long time in coming. Almost half a century since I had lived on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the mid-1970s where I taught high school English and wrote for the local newspaper. As a private pilot back then, I took the opportunity to visit just about every island in the West Indies and later spent months living and working in Martinique and Haiti. The Caribbean seeped easily into my veins. As a feature writer for the Turks & Caicos magazine, Times of the Islands, I explore the region's rich and turbulent history and chronicle unfolding developments. These ever-changing, always-alluring islands and the people who inhabit them are my passion and reason to wake up in the morning. Growing up in vastly different cultural environments from Hawaii, where I was born, to Oslo, Norway, to the San Joaquin Valley of California allowed me to move easily between different peoples and landscapes. Sometimes as an outsider looking in, sometimes as an insider granted access to tell a story. In October 2024, I published my first book entitled The Jamaican Bobsled Captain: Dudley "Tal" Stokes and the untold story of struggle, suffering and redemption behind Cool Runnings.