My Book About Me

I was born on my sister's fifth birthday in December of 1983. We grew up in New Jersey in the shadow of the Watchung Mountains in one of the little valley towns first settled by Quakers. At the Sears on my highway growing up, you could see a mural of the legend of a Native American princess who saved the life of a Dutch settler and on the fourth of July, you could watch the fireworks from above at the vista of Washington rock. In this historic setting, I drank kool-aid, drew pictures, picked my nose, read stories under the sheets with a flashlight, passed between hedges to play in the yard of my next door neighbor, and wrote constipated little rhyming poems about bunnies.

My parents were working class but considered themselves first-and-foremost artists--my mother's paintings littered the basement; my father scrawled tiny ballpoint images on napkins and wrote short stories about pigeons--and through environment and genetics passed these traits on to their daughters. My sister Emily is a painter and zine publisher and web designer and writer and amazing and won an anti-smoking poster contest in the second grade. Meanwhile, I drew and wrote about many different obsessions in my childhood, from dragons to mutant hero turtles to the Beatles to vampires to Star Trek. Although my artistic focus has become more diversified, I am still, utterly and completely, a dork at heart.

I went to college at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey (near poetically historic Paterson, focus of the famous William Carlos Williams' poem and old stomping ground of Allen Ginsberg). While there, I studied poetry with Timothy Liu and shared both writing and nerdiness with my incredible coworkers at the William Paterson Writing Center. Thanks, in part, to the encouragement of the other writers there, I completed my undergraduate thesis in poetry, a collection of forty prose poems about my childhood. Sometime during this period I also fell in love with Jordan, a mensch and Civil War era prospector. In September of 2008, we will celebrate our sixth anniversary.

I graduated with honors in May 2006. Just over one year later, I began what's been the one of the biggest biggest adventures of my life so far: moving a thousand miles away to attend the University of Florida's Creative Writing Graduate Program for my M.F.A. in poetry.I currently live in a second story apartment with my banjo and my cat, Sammy. I am not as pale as I once was.