On a rainy Saturday in March of 2002, I was wandering the fishing village of Beaufort, North Carolina when I came to the door of the North Carolina Maritime Museum. Inside, two life-sized engravings of women pirates stood right there among relics from Blackbeard's more famous Queen Anne's Revenge. Women, standing there among the piles of grapeshot, the coins found on the sea's floor, the pistols and cannon.
Women pirates? Impossible...
At the time, I was working on a collection of poetry, but I needed a bigger canvas, a novel's canvas, to work out the questions these two women raised: Anne Bonny and Mary Read had chosen the pirate deck, where other women had been taken captive, raped, murdered...so why had they done it?
Eight years of research, writing, and rewriting later, I have brought these women to life, along with their brutal and beautiful world: the waning years of piracy's Golden Age on the Caribbean.
The result is The Pirate's Brand, an epic historical novel which traces the paths of two very different women, one from London’s streets and the other from the drawing rooms of Charleston high society, onto the same pirate deck: where they struggle to reconcile the ghosts and shadows of their pasts with the life they have chosen.