Debby Pattiz’s childhood in the 1970s as a pasty white girl from a Black neighborhood in Chicago’s South Shore was followed by her adolescence among Asian refugees and immigrants near Oakland’s Chinatown, raising early questions about the accident of identity. Those questions were compounded during an unusual junior year abroad in 1988, which established Debby as one of only a handful of Americans to participate in daily life in East Germany. The experience marked her soul.

Her early lived experiences segued into a scholarly and real-life fascination with the intersection of language, culture, and identity. After completing a B.A. in International Relations at Brown University and an M.A. in Instructional Systems Design at the University of Maryland, Debby pursued a career in English as a Second Language. It was a calling that took her to four continents to design and deliver teacher training programs and teach writing to international college students. She has taught and developed ESL curricula with the University of Southern California, the University of California at Berkeley Extension, the University of Alaska, and the University of Maryland, among others. Debby is a member of Jericho Writers.

Debby wed her college sweetheart and raised a son, a daughter, a herd of cats, and an obstinate Corgi named Frodo. As her children grew up, an insistent, hazy memory tugged her back in time.

Debby has explored 50 countries on five continents and speaks German, Spanish, and rusty Portuguese. Her research into a thirty-year old mystery from a vanished authoritarian nation has led to university lectures in Germany, interviews on US and German podcasts, and a feature essay in the Brown Alumni Magazine. When not writing or hiking over dunes in coastal California, Debby can be found in the laundry room struggling to extract sand from her socks.