“I too, dislike it,” began Marianne Moore in her ars poetica, “Poetry,” which I read in twelfth-grade AP English. I thought I fell into this camp until, in college, a friend showed me two Sharon Olds poems and a window blew open in my chest.

I spent the summer after graduation at my parents’ farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, banging out attempts on my father’s old Royal typewriter. Interning that fall at The Paris Review in New York City, I saw how rarely the old boys’ club cracked open the door to new voices. I wrote poems sporadically after that. But poetry wasn’t done with me and I am back at it, writing in a converted barn in the Catskill Mountain foothills, raising two daughters, cooking pots of soup and curry, refilling the birdfeeder, doing yoga by my wood stove, and writing some more.  

I am beginning to humbly and gratefully collect a few honors. Three of my poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and two for Best of the Net awards. I was named a finalist for the David Wade Hogue Poetry Scholarship Martha Award in 2022. And my chapbook Blood Moon Aria was long-listed for the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2024 chapbook competition.

I’m over the (blood-red) moon to say that Red Bird Chapbooks has chosen to publish Blood Moon Aria for publication in late 2025. Many poems in this collection probe the liminal and largely unsung terrain of perimenopause and menopause as fertile ground for electric transformation.

Nature imagery echoes strongly through my poems, as do themes of motherhood, birth, loss, desire, and longing.