When Life Haunts Art

On the afternoon of Saturday, December 13, 2025, my phone came alive with news alerts from the New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, and Wall Street Journal of an active shooter on the campus of Rhode Island's Brown University: 2 dead. Multiple injured. Shooter at large. 

(The Difficulty of Writing Difficult Scenes.)

On the other side of the country in Northern California, I stared at my device in disbelief. As a former journalist turned writer, I've spent multiple years studying gun violence in America, and even though active-shooter attacks, school shootings, mass shootings, and so-called inner-city shootings have become common in this country, I'm always unsettled when they occur. This time even more so. 

Brown University factors significantly in the plot of my debut novel, The Curse of Hester Gardens, set for release in Spring 2026. The book is a gothic novel set in a public housing project, with a main character, a mother named Nona McKinley, who is dealing with the twin specters of a supernatural curse and gun violence. When the book opens, her oldest son has already been shot to death, but she's hoping to get her middle son Marcus out of their high-crime community. She's proud that her hard work, determination, and prayers have been answered. It's his high school graduation day, and he's headed to an Ivy League school in the fall. To—you guessed it—Brown University.

As any novelist will tell you, no matter the length of the work, each decision we make is done painstakingly so. I chose Brown University as the institution Marcus is headed to, the place where his mother hangs all her hopes, because of the school's progressive financial aid department, the cornerstone, an initiative known as The Brown Promise. The promise removes loans from university financial aid packages and replaces them with scholarships so that students can focus more on their studies and less on how to pay for them. That initiative was so integral to the reason that I chose this school that it is referenced in name when Marcus's ability to register for fall classes has come into question. 

"What about the Brown Promise?" Marcus's church pastor asks Nona, unwilling to let a registration fee stand in the way of Marcus's future. “A hundred percent of tuition for students who are in need. No loans. All through grants and work-study.”

I even bypassed my own Ivy League alma mater, Columbia University, where, supported by work-study jobs but racking up student loan debt, I struggled to afford tuition, to register for classes, to keep my phone on. There was one summer, when I’d used all of my work-study money to afford transportation to and a wardrobe for an unpaid internship that would go on my resume, the cafeteria was closed for a long holiday weekend, and I survived several days in a row eating only a baked yam every night for dinner. 

I believed that if Marcus—bright but broke—were headed off to an Ivy, then Brown would be the one. It mattered so much that I exercised some creative license in putting the initiative in the book. The story unfolds in 2016 and the Brown Promise wasn't launched until 2018. I balanced two warring historical facts in creating a summer when both Barack Obama was still in the White House and Marcus can leave home with the promise of a financial aid package that would not create a future of debt for him. 

The story takes place in Hester Gardens, a fictional midwestern housing project with hints of Chicago's Cabrini Green and Detroit's Herman Gardens, the latter of which was about a mile from my childhood home. Without spoilers, the book tackles gun violence head on, and many of the characters do not survive. Late in the book, in a haunting coincidence, a character imagines an active shooter attack on Brown University's campus: “What if he had shot us all up?”

I studied gun violence in America for two years and have kept my eye on the general trends ever since. Until December 2025, there has never been an active-shooter incident at an Ivy League school that I'm aware of. A person-to-person shooting? Yes. One at Harvard comes to mind. But active shooter? No.

What. Are. The. Odds?

*****

I slept terribly that night, the research making its rounds in my mind. 

Gun violence is a public health crisis. 

It is the leading cause of death for young people. 

In 2023, around 48,000 people died by gun. 

More than 200 Americans visit the emergency department for nonfatal firearm injuries each day.

Americans own nearly half of the world’s civilian-owned firearms. 

Forty-six percent of U.S. households report owning at least one firearm. 

Each day, about 132 people die from gun violence.

One death every 11 minutes.

So, of course this would eventually happen on an Ivy League campus. Whether you're at school, a nightclub, a mall, a movie theater, or near a bus stop not far from home like Nona's oldest son, shot to death at 18, no one is immune. No place is sacred.

By Monday morning I was convinced we needed to pull all references to Brown from the book. My manuscript had entered the production process in summer 2025, with copyediting, proofreading, cover art selection, publicity calls, and care given to all back matter, including content warnings. My final read of the manuscript had occurred a full month before the shooting, but would the reader know that? I wouldn't want anyone to think I was being insensitive by selecting Brown. To think I was trying to capitalize on the tragedy. And more importantly, I wouldn't want anyone to pick up my book and become triggered, particularly a survivor, a victim's family member, an alum. My heart went out to all of them. 

I reached out to my agent, who touched base with my editor, who said she would check on where the file was in the production process. 

As I waited, the nightmare in Rhode Island continued to unfold. Law enforcement took a person of interest into custody and released them, citing lack of evidence. The suspect was still at large. The FBI released images of a new person of interest. Names and photos of the two people killed came out— MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, an 18-year-old student from Virginia, and 19-year-old Ella Cook from Alabama. The same news cycle from every past shooting the media deemed important enough to cover was trotted out yet again. We've seen this all before. Multiple times. Too many times.

I'm a former nail biter, and by Tuesday I was seconds from doing so. But my agent got back to me, and the file was already at the printer, my publisher had said. The digital ARCs had already gone out. The physical ARCs were about to hit the mail. We would delay production of the hardcover first edition if we made changes to it, but they fully supported my desire to make changes for the e-book and paperback. 

I opened my manuscript on my computer and stared at Pages 370 and 371, where the idea of a mass shooting on Brown’s campus was made plain on the page, prescient but brutally so.

“What if he had shot us all up?” 

Something in me changed. Leaving it in for the first edition while changing it in the others didn’t seem like a strong enough response to me, but what was the best way to handle this?

I could scream! 

*****

I am close to the material because I grew up in a high-crime neighborhood in Detroit at the height of the crack epidemic and one of the earliest memories I have in life is the pall cast over my family after my uncle was shot to death. My book is dedicated to him and to every person who has lost their life to a gun in America.

And the more I sat with the images of MukhammadAziz and Ella, two Brown students now added to the tens of thousands who had already been gunned down in 2025, the less I wanted a solution to the book production that left things unsaid, unaddressed. 

After careful reflection, and some tears if I'm being honest, I told my agent I wanted to keep the references in all editions, and to bring it up directly, head on, because this was the whole point, wasn't it? To make sure we all see. To put the pain on the page. 

The problem doesn't, in fact, lie with my gothic horror book about death by gun and its references to Brown University. The problem is that death and injury by gun is so prevalent in America that I can pick any spot in this country, put it in a book, and with enough time, it will be touched by gun violence. 

The first step in healing is deciding you want change. And from the outset I'd hoped The Curse of Hester Gardens could continue this national conversation. That we all could agree we don’t have to live like this any longer. That we could come to an aggressive national consensus to fix this once and for all. For my uncle. For all victims of gun violence to date. For MukhammadAziz and Ella.

My hope remains.

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