I live 50 feet from the ocean – less in high tides and hurricanes.  I’ve been writing poetry since I was five or six, in journals and on scraps of paper.  After graduating from college in New Jersey, I thought about going to graduate school in English Literature, but this was the 1970s, and there was too much happening in the world to bury myself in academics.  Instead I travelled across country with three friends for a month, winding up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived for the next ten years.  I worked many jobs – secretary, waitress, factory worker – discovered much about myself and engaged in progressive activism.

Eventually I returned to my roots in the Washington DC suburbs, where my husband, son and I lived for the next twenty-five years. I became a teacher, then reading/language arts supervisor in a large, multicultural school district outside of DC. My favorite thing to “teach” was poetry - reading it, writing it, supporting teachers to share it with students in fresh and meaningful ways. I wrote several articles, book chapters and poems about teaching and writing. (some are listed here.)