BIO

I'm a writer, reader, editor, designer, fundraiser, case-maker, nonprofit professional, art enthusiast, lapsed cellist, and forever collector. I collect books, other people’s good words and their drafty ideas, print ephemera, ceramics, jokes, striking images, doodles, interesting wood scraps, things that are mustard-colored, and songs with a wicked drum beat or bass guitar line. I’m from the metro Detroit area and have lived in Ann Arbor, MI; Tucson, AZ; San Francisco, CA; and now in Minneapolis, MN. I’ve worked for more than fifteen years helping nonprofits in the arts, education, and civic tech spaces communicate their work to funders and other audiences. I’m a founding board member of the awesome Fireweed Community Woodshop in Minneapolis. I have an undergrad degree in English and a master’s degree in graphic design. I’ve been a freelancer and consultant since 2019, and have spent the last handful of years ramping up my own writing practice and flipping the focus of my days from my work-work to my creative work. I love using work-work to get my brain firing in high gear, then shifting that power over to my creative work — hoodwinking the hard-to-break impulse to always focus on other people’s needs before my own.

WHAT I MAKE

Essays, poems, stories, novels + novellas, books, posters, publications, objects, audio recordings

INSPIRED BY

I am inspired by publications: books, zines, magazines; how does a publication convey a completeness; what are the edges of completeness? What can be contained on a page, minimally and maximally? I am also inspired by comics and cartoonists and illustrators who are combining drawing or other visuals with writing to tell dimensional stories.

I am inspired by sensory and cross-sensory experiences: visual design, color, ceramics from mugs to tiles to sculpture, disruptions of spatial expectations, the non-home home, book covers, music and percussion experiences, the layering of sounds and instruments; how all these things could be translated into language. 

I am inspired by physical activity and the chemicals it releases into my body.

EXPLORING:

I’m working on a writing project(s) that shape-shifts between memoir and novel, aiming to transform many words I have written over the past three to five-plus years into something that has edges, boundaries, can perhaps be contained by two covers. I am perennially trying to figure out how to pull “chunks” out of my daily writing process and to “complete” projects, or at least turn some of that work into something that I and others could look at together and say, “that looks complete.” I firmly believe that the covers of a book (or a chapbook, or a magazine, etc) do some of that work: if it’s between two covers — or if there is a first page and a last page — it might be finished! I am always working on holding space for my creative work; my own sense of what this means has been shifting and continues to shift. My initial approach meant carving time out of my work day; now I am thinking more about how to organize my days around my creative practice.