Acknowledged as the expert on Evelyn Nesbit, aka The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, she has acted as a consultant to A&E, PBS, the History Channel, and the Smithsonian Channel She is a specialist in American Literature (favorites: Poe, Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, the Gothic and Grotesque), women’s studies, film history, and 19th and 20th Century American popular culture. A native New Yorker (with deep family roots in Greenpoint, Brooklyn), she lives in Lindenhurst, NY in a haunted house built in 1890.