Fourth generation Wilmington, Delaware, I grew up walking to both my grandmothers’ houses (opposite sides of the same park). Most of my extended family lived in the same neighborhood. Far was a fifteen-minute drive. I moved to Connecticut and then Western Massachusetts in the middle of high school. (Read into that all you want.)

After graduating from the College of the Holy Cross, I went to the University of Chicago and fell hard for the city. I left too soon for Clarksville, Tennessee, because I married a lieutenant stationed at Fort Campbell. (The lieutenant and I had actually known each other a few years, having been students together at the Massachusetts high school.)

Eleven days after our wedding, terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center. So that infantry boy was gone. Not dead—but gone. And Clarksville was neither Chicago nor Wilmington.

He left for overseas (and eventually came back), and we eventually left Clarksville for a brief spell in Massachusetts, and then Philadelphia.

Along the way (and in no order), I’ve worked at Pier 1 and in higher ed, waitressed, taught English at the college level, coordinated classes at a marine manufacturing non-profit, wrote and edited as a freelancer, and pulled strings on a tobacco farm. I’m also raising four kids. I’ve always been a reader. The writing began later–around forth grade.

Those early months of our marriage started cropping up a lot in my writing (which I started, in earnest, in 2013). I’m currently working on a book-length thing about that time.

I now live outside Philadelphia (forty minutes from Wilmington) with the same husband and those four children. I write. I read. I swim. Not all three together.