One of the beautiful things I've learned while walking this earth for six decades now is that there is always a way into a task. Sometimes it's a well-worn path, like the path for writing a bio. I'll admit, I was tempted (for about 10 seconds) to ask generative AI to write one for me. Everyone can use that cotton-candy boost of positivity those little chatbots bring from time to time.

I've created some of my own writing paths. In recent attempts at poetry, I've become aware that some might actually be ruts. Even now, I recognize I'm taking the same way into this bio as the way into many of my blog posts about family life and living with autism. You can find that work here on this website, along with select clips from my 20-year career in daily journalism. You won't find any poetry here - at least not yet.

I was fortunate to have the University of North Texas Press publish my first book in 2008, See Sam Run, a memoir chronicling my autistic son's early childhood. Sam was diagnosed in the 1990s, just as autism was becoming widely known and better understood. The book won the Mayborn Prize for Literary Nonfiction.

I was even more fortunate to collaborate with my dear friend Shahla Ala'i-Rosales to write an autism parenting book. Shahla is an expert in autism and early childhood development. Different Roads to Learning published the first edition in 2022. Reviewers call Responsible and Responsive Parenting in Autism: Between Now and Dreams a "first-stop, must-read" for parents, caregivers, and the professionals who support them. Shahla and I picked up the second edition and released it in ways that make it more accessible, through independent bookstores and libraries, and in audiobook and ebook as well.

The cover of the second edition of Responsible and Responsive Parenting in Autism: Between Now and Dreams, by Shahla Ala'i-Rosales and Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe, includes the painted, abstract image of a child gazing up at her mother. A quote from renowned autism expert Peter Gerhardt at the bottom says, "The second edition of Between Now and Dreams should be required reading ... a parenting road map that is more empathetic than it is sympathetic."

Most days, you can find me at a quiet desk in Modesto, California, working on my third book on living with disability. After I watched the Crip Camp documentary, I wondered what if there was a Camp Jened for parents, one that helped us with the shift from caregiver to ally? All parents do their best to let go as their teenagers become adults. But for many disability parents, letting go of that caregiver role is fraught and difficult. The manuscript is taking shape with the big ideas that build paths, finding that way in, so we can become better allies to those we love.