I’ve been a writer and a teacher for a very long time. And I’m very lucky because those are the two things I’ve always wanted to do. Both teachers and writers can nudge the world. I was born in San Francisco, California and grew up in pre-Silicon Valley, San Jose when it was still fruit orchards. When I was little I read to my dolls up in our walnut tree, or played detective crawling through neighbors’ backyards. And some time, when I was still quite small, I decided that the finest thing I could do would to be a writer. Then I could create the type of imaginary world I loved so much. Authors like C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and Sir Authur Conan Doyle, had captured my imagination.

I graduated from the U of Santa Clara in CA. and traveled to the Midwest for grad school at U of I. For many years I wrote and published poetry, while teaching almost every age level from pre-school to college. But my real area of teaching specialty is working with gifted teens, and I still do that today. Along the way, I married Dennis and had two amazing children of my own, moved to the Olympic Peninsula of WA, and then to the dry side of WA State. It was here, in the desert shrub steppe that I started writing both non-fiction and fiction in addition to poetry.

I think I started with poetry because I love playing with words, and poems were short enough to fit into the small pockets of time in my life. My poetry has been published many journals including: Smartish Pace , The Atlanta Review, Southern Review, North American Review and Nimrod . It can also be found in the anthologies Margins , Pontoon8 and The Washington Poetry Association collection Tattoos on Cedar . Recently I won the New Eden Chapbook Competition for my collection Wingward .

In my role as a teacher, I was appointed the McAuliffe Fellow for WA State in 2000 and that fellowship gave me time to write two non-fiction books, Student Inquiry and Nuclear Legacy . Nuclear Legacy was written with a class of 8 th grade students who all became published authors. The book took me to Chernobyl, Ukraine to look at how lives were impacted by the world’s largest nuclear disaster. Our family spent one summer working in the United Arab Emirates, and another traveling through France and England.

My first YA adult novel, Wolfproof , started with one of the characters in a poem I wrote. The poem “Greenman” was based on carvings of foliate heads found in old churches throughout the British Isles. Eventually the greenman character from the poem worked his way into the story Wolfproof. And if you’re wondering about the title Wolfproof, well, it came from a poem too! The sequel to WP should be out next year .

Today, besides writing, I give author presentations and workshops, (see the contacts page for more info.), travel as much as possible, occasionally play bicycle polo with my husband’s team, and generally try to keep up with the rest of my family’s adventures and creative endeavors. I live in a big house by the Columbia River and enjoy taking Bear the dog on walks to look for beavers.