About the Book

When queer teen Ella returns from the eco-apocalypse, her videos of the future go viral. She teams up with her girlfriend and their crew to build a movement to stop the global resource wars before they start. But can the people who brought her to the future be trusted? She needs to choose between her father’s green energy corporation and her girlfriend who fights it. ELEVEN ELEVEN is a 99,000 word Young Adult, science fiction, and #ownvoices novel. This book is a survivor narrative with the raw honesty of SPEAK by Laurie Halse Anderson set in the context of young activists organizing for social change like LITTLE BROTHER by Cory Doctorow with the dizzying, paradoxical time travel motifs of DONNIE DARKO.

Shy, intense Ella Harris just wants her friendship with Cane to go to the next level, but her fixation on the time 11:11 is getting in the way of the two connecting. They finally kiss on 11/11, but when the clock strikes that peculiar time, Ella’s catapulted hundreds of years into the future. There, a man named Andrew convinces her to return to her own time and avert a future eco-apocalypse that has all but destroyed humanity. She is at once terrified and convinced she’s found her calling. Sent back to the past, Ella launches #OCCUPYTHEFUTURE with the aid of her brother Trevor, her now-girlfriend Cane, and their activist friends.

She feverishly pushes her message, posting shocking videos of the future that go viral. But her parents are unconvinced. They commit Ella to a psychiatric facility, where she must struggle to regain her freedom and join the global movement her videos have created. With the help of Cane and her friends, Ella is able to win her independence and rejoin the fray. Yet even as she fights back against the government forces attempting to silence her, Ella is suspicious about all the players coming to the table. Even her father has changed tunes, ready now to use the social movement she incited to further his “green energy” and oil company’s goals.

Andrew urges Ella to take the deal against Cane’s objections, leaving Ella torn between loyalty to Andrew and her father on the one hand, and her movement—and girlfriend—on the other. She suspects there’s a crucial missing piece, and that 11:11 might still hold the key, if only she can figure out her link to it. But the more she digs, the more she uncovers a raw and painful wound—one she can’t remain silent about any longer. She can’t save the world from environmental devastation if she doesn’t speak out and confront her perpetrator…and she can’t do either alone.

I teach English and Creative Writing at Los Medanos College. I am a Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. I write for The Body is Not an Apology, a website that had 1.2 million unique visitors in 2016.  In Summer 2019, North Atlantic Books will publish a book I co-edited and wrote for entitled We’ve Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health.