Born and raised in France –I still call Paris my home– I grew up convinced that I would become a journalist. At age seven I received my first typewriter as a Christmas gift (for the record I still can’t type properly despite all the years of practice) and started thinking of myself as the next Christiane Amanpour, the famous war correspondent. Years later, while being bombed in Beirut, Lebanon, lying under my bed, flat on my back, with a pillow covering my face, I realized that her job might be overrated. After graduating from high school I decided to study contemporary history and international relations in the hope of becoming one of the few reporters who could pronounce the names of some of the most obscure foreign countries. I ended up in the United States, not the most exotic of the bunch but a place that I quickly grew to love. And reporting in Iowa (the Mid-West in all its splendor) or Roswell, New Mexico, (UFO territory), still feels pretty foreign to me.

I first discovered the U.S. in the summer of 1991, while a student at the University of Paris, when I landed a summer job at New York’s most beloved symbol: the Statue of Liberty. She and I shared our Frenchness. Back in Paris to finish my graduate studies, interning at a local newspaper, I decided that it was now time to go West and found a way to do it by applying for a scholarship which allowed me to spend a year in San Francisco. I fell in love with both the city and the American who is now my husband and decided to settle in the States for a while.

I became an editor at Le Journal Français, a monthly magazine published in America, while doing some freelance writing for some high-profile French publications. I also became a contributing writer for France Today, an English bimonthly. From 1998 to 2000 I went back to school to obtain a Masters of Journalism from the University of Berkeley, where I was the recipient of the Susan Yoachum Prize for demonstrated excellence in political reporting. At that time I also became the U.S. correspondent for the French business weekly CB NEWS.

During the summer of 1999 I spent three months working as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and started freelancing for the American press. After the events of September 11, 2001 I jumped in the first plane that was allowed to land in New York to report the story. From San Francisco I also started working for the English desk of Agence France Presse, the French news agency.

I spent most of 2002 writing my first book: ‘Ethnik! Le marketing de la différence’, which examined the face of a ‘Latino-Black-Asian America’ through the rise of commercial multiculturalism. The book was published in the Spring of 2003.