I was born and raised in Ontario, Canada on Lake Erie and spent a significant portion of my adult life intimately engaged with the Boreal forest and Georgian Bay shoreline and waters of Manitoulin Island.
A most important relationship in my life is with the outdoors and I’ve shaped my life, professionally and personally, to continue an ongoing conversation with it. After graduating from The University of Michigan with a degree in comparative literature, the early years of my career were spent teaching in inner-city high schools in the Flint area working with at-risk students. A highlight was designing a curriculum in collaboration with a nearby nature reserve that allowed me to teach outdoors and gave students a needed experience of safety and nurturance while outside. My students also launched the school’s first environmental group that ran the district’s first school recycling program. After receiving my MFA in poetry in Louisville, Kentucky, I taught creative writing at a city college and then became an editor and consultant for a boutique literary and branding agency in New York. On the weekends, I ran a monthly writing in nature workshop at a local nature preserve. My poetry has been published in various journals, both in print and online, and in 2009 was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Though I stopped writing for several years to raise my 4 children as a single mom, I have since begun again, poking at the questions that travel with me through poems and art-making. I’m most grateful for the creative community that abounds in Leelanau, a place I’ve been lucky to call home since 2016. I completed the docent training program fall of 2023, and I lead hikes called Hike with a Poet that combine my passion for poetry with my passion for the outdoors to create a ritualized space for people to remember their inherent connection with all that is. I’m also an avid reader, amateur gardener, novice textile artist, and apprentice to the wisdom of walking. I spend many hours each week with my dog-kids traipsing through the hills and woods that surround my home and especially along the shoreline of our beloved Lake Michigan.
