My entire educational and professional life has revolved around writing.

I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) with a degree in English/Creative Writing.  I went on to earn a Masters in Creative Writing/Poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. And then I completed an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

After my graduate studies, I moved to Japan for three years with my husband. We then returned to Milwaukee, where we raised four children. Eventually, I found my way back to UWM where I started teaching composition to international and other multilingual students in the English Language Academy.  Securing the job long-term meant earning another Masters, this time from Shenandoah University in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). I’ve now been on staff at UWM for ten years.

Through all this, I’ve learned a few simple things: whenever we write, we try to communicate something important with the language available to us. That’s what my students hope to achieve laboring over a composition, and it’s what I hope to achieve laboring over a poem. It’s even what I hope to achieve with this website. And whenever we write, we find it worth our effort when someone reads what we’ve written and their eyes light up. Because we all just want to be understood. We all just want to connect.