“I too, dislike it,” famously 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 teen girls, 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 small honors. I was named a finalist for the David Wade Hogue Poetry Scholarship Martha Award in 2022; my poem “Arrival” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023; and my chapbook Blood Moon Aria was long-listed for the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2024 chapbook competition.

My recent work probes 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.