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 am a writing professor, naturalist, memoirist, and picture book author whose work follows 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.

STUDIES IN STORYTELLING

I was honored to be a Fellow in the Children’s Literature Fellowship Program at the Lichtenstein Center, where I studied under the mentorship of Emma Walton Hamilton. I hold a BA in English and recently completed a certificate in Narrative and Creative Writing for Nonfiction through Cornell University — work that continues to shape my approach to story. These days, I share that love of storytelling with college students across all majors at Stony Brook University, teaching them to communicate clearly, confidently, and with heart.

IN MAGAZINES, MEDIA, AND MORE

My essays have appeared in Coping Magazine, Business Insider, HuffPost, and other outlets, like Elephants and Tea. You can read them here.

CURRENT PROJECTS

Memoir

At nineteen, my world broke in two. A rare diagnosis collided with first love, and I refused to be cast as “that cancer girl.” What followed was a single semester unlike any other — two nineteen-year-olds in hospital waiting rooms, experimental clinical trials, and a love neither of us had the experience to understand, only the instinct to hold onto.

For decades, I rarely spoke of that winter. My memoir is my return to it — and a reckoning with the self I once tried to outrun.

Picture Books

I have several completed picture book manuscripts spanning fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid, most rooted in the everyday wonders of the natural world and the people who protect it. Drawing on my life as a naturalist and mother of four, I write stories that celebrate what happens when you stop and look: at the moon still hanging in the morning sky, at the praying mantis on the garden wall, at the starling murmuration that stops our whole family mid-trail. My work explores nature, family, neurodiversity, and the quiet magic hiding in plain sight. Current projects include The Cosmic Snack series, a laugh-out-loud picture book series in which a child’s meals are hilariously hijacked by hungry, friendly celestial visitors — beginning with The Moon Wants to Share Your Breakfast.

Nature Writing

I am a naturalist with my head perpetually in the sky or a flower patch, tracking the dragonfly that visits every summer or the mama bear and her cubs spotted on the side of a mountain road. I’m a member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America and believe we don’t simply observe the natural world. We belong to it.

That conviction runs through everything I write. My nature writing explores moments of stillness, resilience, and connection: the small wonders hiding in plain sight that remind us, if we stop long enough to look, that we are never separate from the world around us.

FROM SURVIVORSHIP TO STUDENT VOICES

Having survived a rare melanoma diagnosis as a teenager — likely one of the only patients my age to undergo early clinical trials that would later become standard immunotherapy — I’m committed to promoting cancer awareness among young people as a member of the National Cancer Survivors Day Foundation Speakers Bureau. I also advise my campus chapter of the Oncology Society. When I’m not writing or teaching, I’m outside — hiking, gardening, photographing blooms and garden critters, or playing fetch with our golden retriever.