Long before I started writing on a laptop, I was scribbling stories and poems anywhere I could. Words felt like magic to me. They still do.
I write about the small, ordinary moments that quietly shape who we are — whether that’s a nineteen-year-old refusing to disappear into illness, or a child watching the moon linger over breakfast and wondering if it wants some.
Featured Essay — Zibby Owens · Between Chapters
Twenty Years of Firsts Didn’t Prepare Me for This
Selected by Zibby Owens for her Between Chapters vertical in June 2026, this essay explores the milestone moments that catch you off guard — and what it means to arrive somewhere you didn’t know you were heading.
“Those were the moments I held onto. I knew, even then, that they were the ones that mattered.”
From Survivorship to Student Voices
Having survived a rare melanoma diagnosis as a teenager — likely among the first patients my age to undergo early clinical trials that would later become standard immunotherapy — I have spent decades learning what long-term survivorship actually means. Not the end of treatment, but everything that comes after. As a member of the National Cancer Survivors Day Foundation Speakers Bureau, I speak to that experience — the silence, the identity, and the slow work of finding your voice again. I also volunteer as faculty advisor to my campus chapter of the Oncology Society.
Head Toward the Sky
I am a member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, serving on its Education Committee and as a judge for its youth writing contests and scholarship awards because I believe we don’t simply observe the natural world. We belong to it. My nature writing and photography are rooted in wonder and shaped by belonging: the kind that turns a dragonfly into a character, a morning walk into a meditation, and a mama bear on the side of a mountain road into a story you carry home with you.
Children’s Stories
Not everything I write is for grown-ups.
A former Children’s Lit Fellow, I also write picture books meant to be read aloud, anywhere, anytime, to anyone who will listen. My work explores nature, family, neurodiversity, and the joy hiding in plain sight. And if a giggle sneaks in somewhere between the first page and the goodnight? Even better.
Alongside the picture books, a YA novel is taking shape — because not every story that finds you is the one you expected.
It turns out that writing for children and writing memoir have more in common than you’d think. Both ask you to pay attention. Both trust the reader completely.
In Magazines, Media, and More
My essays have appeared in Coping Magazine, Business Insider, HuffPost, and others.
The Youngest One Is Graduating. I Didn’t Expect to Feel This Way.
On watching your youngest cross the stage — and what it means when the chapter of raising young children starts to quietly closes behind you.
Read →What It Means to Live on the Other Side of a Rare Diagnosis
Writing about long-term survivorship for the AYA cancer community: the silence that comes after treatment ends, and what it takes to speak again.
Read →What Survivorship Means to Me
A reflection on identity, diagnosis, and what it means to be standing here — offered through the National Cancer Survivors Day Foundation Speakers Bureau.
Read →