My work is a hard stare at the rigors of the human condition while seeking to create beauty with language, to be the most precise of the ineffable with words. When I finally accepted that to be my most vulnerable and authentic self, I had to write, I was middle-aged. I’d been a critical care nurse for decades, was raising two children, and had gotten sober. I’d been reading since my twenties: Flannery O’Conner, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Annie Proux, and didn’t know it then, but my literary influence had begun. My writing continues to be influenced by Melissa Febos, Claudia Rankine, Nick Flynn, Tony Hoagland, to name a few.

I graduated from Vermont College of Fine Arts where I learned that literature is an encyclopedia of craft. I wrote fiction for many years, then suddenly found myself drawn to nonfiction. My prose has appeared in River Teeth, Blue Mesa Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. I’m a recipient of the AWP Kurt Brown Prize, the Taos Resident Award, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. When my brother died during the pandemic, I set aside my novel-in-progress, A Brief Intermission with the Angels, based on my experiences as a cardiothoracic critical care nurse, and began fervently writing a memoir-in-essay that circles around his suicide. 



Rilke wrote that we must live the question. I write into my bewilderment, reaching for deeper understanding of the meaning of life, while acknowledging that answers will be few, if any. Through my words, I hope to weave threads of connection, to hit that sweet spot of humankind.