About Me
I was born in New York City, the only child of two physicians, and raised in Manhattan and in New York’s Hudson Valley; for most of my pre-college education I attended the United Nations International School, where I received an International Baccalaureate diploma. I received my BA from Bryn Mawr College and my PhD from the University of Chicago. I lived in Waterloo, Iowa for 22 years before moving to Greensboro, North Carolina in 2021.
As an English professor at the University of Northern Iowa my specialty area was early American literature, with a focus on New England religious dissenters and queer readings. My scholarly work has appeared in Early American Literature, Feminist Studies, William & Mary Quarterly, and essay collections including Long Before Stonewall: Same-Sex Sexualities in Early America, ed. Thomas Foster. During my career I taught widely within American literature, including a course on American poetry to 1915.
I had been deeply engaged in writing poetry during college and early in my PhD work, but for reasons I both do and do not understand that slipped away from me for decades. In 2017, I realized the only thing that would make my life bearable in our new era would be dropping the mask of academic distance and regaining my creative voice. In 2018 I started writing poetry again (and publishing it for the first time), and in 2019 retired early from my tenured position and began working on my MFA in poetry. In 2021 I graduated from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
My long chapbook What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer grows out of my longstanding deep interest in Mary Dyer’s life (I first published an academic article on her in 2001, summarized in her Wikipedia entry), and my complex sense of identification with her, based in my time as a Quaker in early adulthood and, especially, my own feelings for an influential female mentor, that I felt gave me insight into Dyer’s bond with her spiritual teacher and midwife Anne Hutchinson. I read Dyer as a proto-lesbian figure and found in her a personal foothold in the 17th-century past. In and after 2016, the image of Dyer as an essential figure of middle-aged female resistance and persistence returned to me with new urgency, and the drive to explore my feelings about her more freely and openly helped lead me back to creative work.
My debut full-length collection, Late Epistle, explores my personal and emotional history in a more direct way, tracing a journey from childhood to the present, and from silence to expression. It tells the life I mostly never told, unearthing the experiences, feelings, and mysteries that for different reasons have been unspeakable for me. Winner of Sappho’s Prize in Poetry for 2022, it is appearing in July 2023 from Headmistress Press, the nation’s only lesbian poetry press.
I now live in the Lindley Park neighborhood of Greensboro with my greyhound and five cats. I’d love to hear from you if you feel a connection to my writing or any part of my story, or have any questions.