About

What do Bat Boy, Eskimo Pies, magicians, and mayflies have in common? Each of them at some point took up residence in my mind, evoking sensations, images, and words I couldn’t ignore. It’s a delight to sit with such obsessions and guide them into the shape of a poem. Sometimes my poetry focuses in on something weird or quirky or delves into the surreal; perhaps that’s my small attempt at “telling it slant” (a phrase from Emily Dickinson’s poem “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”).

Some contemporary poets I admire for their skill and talent in crafting poems that live in the realm of the funny, the odd, and the fantastic: Amy Gerstler, Tony Hoagland, Thomas Lux, James Tate, and Charles Harper Webb.

I live in Seattle, where I am a freelance writer and editor, teacher, and an editor for the online poetry and art journal the DMQ Review.

My chapbook Magic Word was published by Pudding House Publications in 2007. Dancing Girl Press will publish my chapbook What to Make of a Diminished Thing in 2012, and my first full-length poetry collection is coming out from Mayapple Press in early 2013.

Awards and honors include: 2008 seminfinalist for the 2008 University of Wisconsin Press Poetry Series contest; finalist for the 2007 St. Lawrence Book Award; semifinalist for the 2008, 2009, and 2010 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and the 2009 Crab Orchard Open Competition; finalist for the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award in 2004, 2006, and 2007; Honorable Mention in Late Blooms Poetry Postcard Contest; semifinalist for the 2005 “Discovery”/The Nation poetry contest.

My work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Crab Orchard Review, the Seattle Review, Crab Creek Review, Hubbub, Floating Bridge Review, 5 AM, and Sentence. I took my MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. I’ve taught poetry writing to children and adults; my “poetry appreciation for cats” class never quite took off.