Hello, and thanks for stopping by.

A little disclaimer about this bio page is in order.

I'll start by saying that I understand why people want to know more about the journalists who write the stories they read, and I appreciate your interest in my work.

However, this bio is not meant to engage you (or anybody else) in the noxious game of journalism-as-celebrity that passes for honest discourse in our country. Journalists who act as though their opinions are infinitely more meaningful and wise than the "common people" they report on should probably consider another profession. Maybe it's the Finn in me, but elitism in journalism feels like a pointless propagation of this endlessly narcissistic culture we live in.

If that makes me a bit cranky and unwilling to participate in most forms of public self-hype, then so be it. It's hardly the only thing I kvetch about. In fact, as my good friends will attest, I am often cranky, but always passionate and deeply engaged human being--even in my most introverted and kvetchy moments.

By nature and by profession, I am thoroughly curious about other human beings on a daily basis. It's in my blood to pay attention to what's happening all around us: watching social cues, patterns of behavior, subtle and egregious violations of human dignity. It's neither fair nor appropriate for this kind of curiousity to be a one-way process. My relationship to the people I write about isn't a disconnected, detached one, although finding that fine line required of immersion in journalism while maintaining healthy boundaries isn't one I will pretend that I've mastered. (Thankfully, I have role models--living and deceased--whose approaches I study and learn from constantly.)

With all that said, here's a bit about me for those of you curious to read more about what I do, why I do it, and the people and social environments that shaped the woman I am today.

I am a full-time, investigative journalist and essayist with credits in over 75 publications, including The Nation, Salon and the Christian Science Monitor. In fall of 2005, I became a Senior Editor at In These Times magazine. My first full-length non-fiction book, Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System, was published by the wonderful women's publishing house, Seal Press (an imprint of Avalon/Perseus) in November 2007.

The hybrid nature of my ancestry led me, early on, to pursue multicultural sourcing and reporting as a constant in my work. It is essential for me to approach the concepts and subjects of my articles with respect, and to begin each story with an open and questioning mind. In this sense, I consider my profession to be a blessing: I am always learning about something new, constantly being exposed to different kinds of people, ideas, life experiences, and ways of looking at the world. (The business and profit-minded aspects of this profession are another matter altogether.)

My articles on social issues--with a particular emphasis on criminal justice, ethnicity and gender--have garnered 12 Society of Professional Journalists regional awards in the Pacific Northwest. I was honored in 2005, 2006 and 2007 to receive four consecutive PASS awards from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency for excellence in magazine journalism, as well as a 2006 national New American Media award for immigration-related reporting. My work has also also appeared in numerous book anthologies including but not limited to: Body Outlaws (Seal Press/Avalon), The W Effect: Bush's War on Women (The Feminist Press, Economics Now (Oxford University Press), Prison Nation (Routledge), as well as the forthcoming Prison Profiteers (The New Press) and It's So You (Seal Press/Avalon/Perseus).

I am the eldest daughter of two gifted violinists, Judith Aller and Ilkka Talvi, who respectively reside in Los Angeles and Seattle. Born in Helsinki, Finland, I was raised in various locales in Finland until 1976, when my immediate family moved to Sweden. I arrived in Hollywood, California in 1977, after the death of my beloved maternal grandfather, Victor Aller, a classical pianist and contractor for the golden era of Warner Brothers films. (For one of the few remaining recordings of my family members from that time period, check out Hollywood String Quartet, highlighting Victor's performances in two piano quintets by Shostakovich and Franck.)

As you might imagine, the Hollywood of 1977 was a very different one than that which had first brought my maternal family of musicians--and one union/activist lawyer--in the early 1930s.

The self-hatred, misogyny, poverty, and racism that I witnessed all around me as a child had a tremendously jarring impact on my psyche, compounded by the alienation that I felt from my peers as a rather introverted, bespectacled, nerdy immigrant kid. Back then, I felt more at home in our Finnish forest sauna than crossing a city street. (To be completely honest, that's never changed.) Ill at ease with L.A.'s car culture and the alternately hyper-materialistic and desperately bleak surroundings of the city, I did the only thing that seemed to make sense to me: I took a giant stage dive into the heart of the darkness in order to seek out the light, the resistance, to that darkness.

When I finally stumbled into the maelstrom of the L.A./West Coast punk scene, I found what I had been looking for: the intensity of the immersion that I both feared and craved, as well as a powerful outlet for my sense of outrage. To this day, I consider the L.A. hardcore/punk scene of the early-late 80s to have been an utterly unique, dynamic social phenomenon unlike anything I've been witness to since that time. The Los Angeles I visit these days has almost nothing to compare to the sociopolitical ferocity of that movement, and it still feels nearly impossible for me to describe. (Fortunately, others with more aptitude in this regard have taken on this task.)

As a teenager during the Reagan/Thatcher years, I also set about devouring books on American political and social history, with the perspective of an outsider determined to make sense of the peculiar world I found myself in. I also began to hone my organizing abilities, ranging from demonstrations against the U.S. funding of Nicaraguan Contras and death squads in El Salvador, to a day long shut-down of the South African consulate in Los Angeles (which gave me my first experience talking to the mainstream press). I published my own, monthly two-page newsletter on political subjects at my public school until I became the editorial page editor of the Fairfax High School newspaper, with the encouragement and unconditional support of a rather kick-ass, old-school journalism teacher. He encouraged his students to develop critical media filters and to protect constitutional rights of speech and press, even in the face of faculty criticism.

I credit that experience with stoking the muckraking embers that burn inside me, and with teaching me that rights of free speech and press matter at various levels of society--not just at the highest echelons of academia or ivy-tower journalism. Regrettably, this is a hard thing to point out and get any amount of support for. I'm tired of seeing the Ivy League and attendance at N.Y.'s and L.A.'s cocktail parties replicated in the bylines of our most respected magazines. I'll go ahead and say it: I'm pissed off about the fact that it leaves 99.9% of the country left out in the process where real representation is concerned.

Feh. Forgive me my crankiness. I'm actually incredibly grateful to be alive, and to be where I am in my career. Today, I'm proud to be able to say that I am just one woman in a long line of artistic, strong-willed survivors, themselves descendent from many different cultures and countries. My 95-year-old paternal grandfather, Veikko Talvi, fought for Finland's independence in the historic Winter and Continuation Wars, in addition to being a journalist and renowned Finnish historian. My family members, on both sides, include a fiery group of men and women who gravitated toward the arts, journalism, farming, the early railroad industry, the military, education, social work, law and medicine.

I earned my BA with Honors in Ethnic Studies in 1991 from Mills College in Oakland, Calif, with a thesis on the evolution of Rastafarian religious and political consciousness. (Our strike against the move to go co-ed in 1990 ensured the continuance and the value of women's higher education at Mills.) I was admitted into the first graduate program in Women Studies at San Francisco State University, completing my study in 1993 with a master's thesis about the Women of the Promised Land: the development of Israeli and Palestinian women's identities as mothers, teachers, and political/social leaders.

Since 1996, I have been a full-time, largely self-employed writer, reporting from areas as diverse as the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, New Mexico, Los Angeles, the Seattle/Puget Sound area, as well as Western and Eastern portions of Washington State. Internationally, I've also reported from Europe, the Caribbean, Canada and Mexico. I am conversant in spoken and written Finnish, but English is my primary language.

For the last several years, I have lived in Seattle, Washington, in the historic Central Area, settled in the mid-1800s by Black and European pioneers. Later years brought the addition to thousands of German and then Sephardic Jewish, Asian, and Scandinavian immigrants. This has been the heart of the African American community for the past several decades--the birthplace of Jimi Hendrix, the Seattle Black Panther Party, and much more--but this proud and resilient neighborhood identity is now in flux because of unchecked gentrification and exorbitant increases in housing prices.

Keeping me company is a very long-haired, fussy cat, Mange, named both for the shape she was in when I rescued her, and for her uncanny ability to grow dreadlocks overnight. I can count on one hand how many creatures on this planet I truly, truly trust to treat me with sweetness, patience and unconditional love ... and she, fortunately, is one of them. I do believe (but cannot quote her on the matter!), that she feels the same where I'm concerned.

Thank you for reading, and for your interest in my work.

And to all of my fellow Finns out there, I say: "MOI!!!""

A few of my favorite quotes:

"There is no such thing as a private intellectual, since the moment you set down words and then publish them you have entered the public world ... Least of all should an intellectual be there to make his/her audiences feel good: the whole point is to be embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant," Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual.

"You need people like me so you can point your fingers and say, 'That's the bad guy,'" Tony Montana (Al Pacino), Scarface.

"I'm not so scared of suffering now. I feel more than I've ever felt." Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhall) in Secretary.

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason," Edward R. Murrow, March 9, 1954.

"Yes, I am a woman, indeed too much of it. That's my tragedy. The great abyss between my woman nature and the nature of the relentless revolutionist is too great to allow much happiness in my life. But then who can boast of happiness?" Emma Goldman, 1907.

"One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap," Ida B. Wells Barnett, about her anti-lynching activism and journalism.

"I couldn't escape the darkness," Richard Pryor, 1940-2005.