Christina's career path was decided when she won Honorable Mention from Cricket Magazine for a short story about bugs. She was seven. She parried that success into a magazine of wacky poems and stories called "Butterfly", which netted $8 an issue thanks to family and friends, convincing her this career could be a moneymaker.

 

After winning a state high school playwriting award and penning her first novel—relegated to a drawer—she majored in creative writing with an education minor at Haverford College. Her senior thesis novella took an infinite number of iterations to bloom into her first Young Adult novel. She then developed those characters into a series about interconnecting teens with unique challenges. 

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Journalism was her first day job, sniffing out stories for an award-winning suburban Philadelphia newspaper Main Line Life with a motley cast of characters in a converted garage next to another reporter’s pooch. Domestic violence and mental illness were the stories that fascinated her, broke her heart and became her passion.

 

And so…she moved to NYC and graduated from Columbia University School of Social Work with a Master’s focusing on policy and a minor in law, and spent a decade promoting healthy relationships and preventing dating violence, sexual assault and child abuse. During that time she wrote speeches, reports, research papers, and policy papers.

 

Her writing has appeared in the New York Post, Girls' Life, Washington Monthly and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others, and she won two second-place Keystone Press Awards. As director of the Start Strong Bronx program, she co-wrote a short film, "Broken Harmonies", produced by Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, about the impact of parenting on teen dating relationships that was used in workshops around the U.S.

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