SNAPSHOT
Current city: Honolulu, HI
Hometown: Chattanooga, TN
Grad: MFA Greensboro, BA Queens University of Charlotte
Publications: The Charlotte Observer, Shuffle Magazine, Hayden's Ferry Review, ZYZZYVA, Hawai'i Review, Ms. Aligned 2: Women Writing About Men
Cats: Gandalf and Hermione
Other Obsessions: Travel, Yoga, Netflix, Food, Books
MY BACKGROUND
I began my career editing the community calendar for The Charlotte Observer, which later led me to cover music and entertainment as one of the newspaper's first bloggers.
This was back in the early 2000s, when I was fresh out of college. I also worked part-time at a coffee shop, and I went to about three concerts a week.
(At the paper, they called me the "Girl About Town," though "Girl About Naps" could have been equally accurate.)
While I continued to contribute as a freelancer, I left the newspaper to work in music marketing for an entertainment distributor, where I edited their weekly trade magazine.
I collected a ton of promo CDs for a couple years, and then I decided that I wanted to go back to school ... to study poetry.
Poetry school: the practical choice, right?
Well, it turns out the same rules about poetry apply to all forms of writing. I learned a lot while I was a student in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
In addition, I had the great honor of serving as poetry editor for The Greensboro Review—a prestigious literary journal that's been publishing for more than 50 years.
That's also where I met my partner, a fiction writer from Hawai'i. He's the reason I moved more than 3,000 miles to live on island time.
Since moving to Hawai'i in 2012, I've hopped around islands and jobs for all sorts of work related to marketing and communications.
Fast forward to now, and you may find me shuffling manuscripts as a journals production editor for University of Hawai'i Press.
On the side, I continue to read, write, and edit for various publications and organizations.
I'm also working on my first book of poems.