About

I write because paying attention has changed my life.

For years I thought I was writing about place: northern Michigan, snowstorms, orchards, the Great Lakes. Later, Chicago. But over time I’ve come to understand that place has always been a way into something larger. My poems ask how we become ourselves after the world changes us, and how beauty continues to exist alongside loss.

I am drawn to moments when the ordinary becomes luminous: white pelicans standing in the cold water of Door County, a chamber orchestra finding words that language cannot, smoke settling over a city, a childhood blizzard that reshapes the world, a piece of salvaged glass transformed into art. These are the moments that ask me to stop, look more closely, and listen for what lies beneath the surface.

Growing up in northern Michigan taught me to notice seasons, weather, and silence. Those rhythms continue to shape my work, even as my interests have expanded toward collaborations with visual artists and musicians, historical research, and the rich conversations that happen between artistic disciplines.

In recent years, I’ve found myself increasingly drawn to Japanese aesthetics, particularly wabi-sabi, the beauty of impermanence, weathering, and repair. My collaboration with glass artist Laurel Grey has deepened that interest, revealing unexpected connections between poetry and visual art. Together we have explored the ways words and objects can illuminate one another, creating conversations neither could have alone. That same sensibility has found its way into my writing, where I return again and again to resilience, transformation, and the quiet grace of things that bear the marks of time.

My poems and essays have appeared in Atlanta Review, Still Point Arts Quarterly, West Trade Review: Roots & Words, Chicago Story Press, Prosetrics Literary Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, Fjords Review, and Halfway Down the Stairs. My work has been recognized by the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition, the Grayson Books Chapbook Competition, and Beyond Words Magazine. In 2026, I was honored to receive the Dick Scuglik Memorial Fellowship at Write On, Door County, where I collaborated with Laurel Grey and Midsummer’s Music to create new ekphrastic work.

My debut poetry collection, The Long Road Out of Eden, is forthcoming from Shanti Arts.

I am currently at work on a hybrid historical project inspired by the 1873 diary of my third great-grandmother, a Michigan medicine woman. Blending poetry, archival research, and historical fiction, the project explores memory, inheritance, and the ways one woman’s courage can echo across generations.

I continue to be drawn toward collaborations across artistic disciplines and cultures, especially those that invite slower ways of seeing. Whether writing in response to landscape, music, sculpture, or historical archives, I return again and again to the same questions: