About the author
Most of what I write,
I wrote in an airport.
Most of what I write, I wrote in an airport — because an airport is a threshold, and many of the books I write are about what happens in that gap.
“JoJo” is what my family and closest friends have always called me. “Pierre” is a piece of my own name, shortened, because people got tired of trying to pronounce the whole thing. But Jo, was also my uncle’s name — my godfather. He was a strong cancer fighting ninja. I was the last face he saw as he left this world. He never got to see his own dreams land. Near the end, I made him a promise: I was going to write about my life, and that he’d be in it. Publishing under his nickname is how I keep that promise.
Before I understood story as a craft, I understood it as a gift. As a young child, my Friday nights belonged to my older siblings and cousins, gathered around our living room fireplace, trading stories until it got too late to be allowed. I spent some summers in Haiti with my grandmother, learning early on that the best stories are the ones you overhear the elders tell each other — not the ones told to you. That instinct, for the story nobody thought was being listened to, never left.
By middle school I’d found theater. By college, writing — screenplays especially, the structure of a life told in scenes. I loved it before I ever thought to build anything on it.
What came after college surprised me: a career that put me on planes for a living — different countries, different sites, different teams, month after month. By then I was spending most of my life away from home, connecting through one airport after another — for grief and for celebration, for work and for reasons I couldn’t always explain to myself. Somewhere in all that transit I found time I didn’t have anywhere else: a notepad, a delay, a window seat with nowhere to be. Most of what I write, I wrote in an airport — in the emptiness and the dark of a red-eye, or in the backseat of a ride, in a spark of an idea that had been waiting for the space to speak, in conversations with strangers I’ll never see again.
Then life happened the way it does to most people eventually — some of it as hard as anything I could have imagined. I wrote through those years because I knew, even while I was living them, that they would need to be told someday, once I made it through. I just didn’t know when — or that it would take losing everything, and meeting a handful of other writers further down the road in life, to finally push me to finish what I’d started.
None of it happened without my family, who gave me the room to go, to build, to fall short and try again, and who never once got tired of hearing where I’d been. I owe them for that. And I owe something too to everyone who’s shaped a story of mine just by living alongside me — including the ones no longer here to read what they inspired.
One doorway, many shelves
People ask why one author has a devotional, a children’s picture book, a book of affirmations for business travelers, a book about relationships and marriage, motivational titles, and now titles translated into French and Spanish, all under the same name. It’s a fair question. The honest answer is that they’re all about the same place.
An airport is a threshold. Nobody standing in one is quite who they were at the door, and nobody is yet who they’ll be when they land — whether that door opens onto a closing chapter or a new one. I write devotionals for the adults standing in that gap. I write children’s books for the kids meeting it for the first time, who find the whole thing enormous and marvelous rather than tedious — and who, frankly, pay better attention than the rest of us. I write daily companions for the people who cross that threshold every week and could use something steadying at the gate. I write about relationships and marriage because a vow is a threshold too — you walk through it as one person and come out someone new, together. I write motivational books because reaching your next level is its own boarding call; you don’t get there by staying at the gate. And I’m publishing in French and Spanish, because a threshold doesn’t mean the same thing in every language — the story shifts depending on the words you tell it in.
Some of these books are about travel. All of them are about thresholds — the doorways you go through, whether or not there’s a boarding pass, a closure, or a new opportunity involved. That’s the shelf. It was always going to be wider than one genre.
What’s next
I’m not finished. TJ’s First Trip to the Airport is growing into a series for the kids just meeting that first threshold. There’s more coming for readers who found Safe Travels and want a companion for the everyday, not only the extraordinary trip. And there will keep being more — because the threshold doesn’t stop showing up, and neither will I.
If you want to know when the next one lands, visit the Books page and add your name to the list for the title you’re waiting for.
Different shelves. Same doorway.