Based in Amsterdam, Dara currently teaches Digital Journalism at Webster University, Leiden. The course focuses on how the multi-media, interactive on-line environment changes the dynamics of news storytelling.

Dara has also created and presents a workshop series called “Dutchisms” for Dutch speakers to improve their communication skills. She is currently working on short stories of literary non-fiction (see excerpt below), as well as fine-tuning a book proposal.

Excerpt from Brooklyn Calling

“Wait, could you introduce yourself first?” blinked the stocky, graying woman in her early-50s, and the kind that seemed indigenous to the New York region: slightly unkempt but hyper alert and forever sizing things up.

“What you do for a living?” she asked as I stared back, playing for time.

I was in Park Slope, Brooklyn, looking at my first apartment with a woman whose daughter had moved to the west coast, leaving her with the task of greeting potential subletters. I had just moved to New York City from San Francisco, lured by the dream of making it as a journalist in America’s greatest city—to writers, a literary Mecca sandwiched between girded steel and filthy waterways. I had arrived late July, 2001 surfed my brother’s couch through August and September, an unexpectedly tragic month, and now it was October and I was still unemployed.

The apartment was in a red brick building on a street lined with brownstones, some worn with rusty facades and others elegantly shaded by trees losing their leaves. Once there, I pressed the buzzer and waited until it hummed, then walked through the entryway, past a dozen Chinese take-out menus scattered under the tarnished mailbox. The studio was up two flights of stairs. It was a narrow room filled with drab, functional furniture but its weathered wooden floors had a welcoming vibe and healthy doses of sunlight streamed through the windows. Before I knew it, I blurted I would take it, only the woman failed to react.

“Sorry, what did you say you did for a living?” she repeated, her voice beginning to sharpen.