I’m a seeker of the unknown.
A teller of the unseen.
A student of the now.
A singer of songs.
A Lyricist.
A Storyteller.
A Teaching Artist.
A Playwright.
A Poet.
A Professor.
A Photographer.
A Pilot of creative adventures.

When I was three years old, I fell out of a moving car and just lay on the street smiling at the clouds as the adults panicked around me. I liked to wear my older brothers’ t-shirts, threw fits at any dress-up occasion, and wondered whether my brain worked funny since I never got the hang of spelling and grammar. I became obsessed with death after watching the Challenger explosion and sat in a dry bathtub for hours when my grandmother died unexpectedly, but insisted I go to school to perform the Christmas Solo in front of my entire Middle School the next day.

I am a work in progress.

I stand on the shoulders of such ancestors as a Swedish Methodist Minister and a feisty German brothel owner who both preached their own ideas of religion, hope, and entrepreneurialism. My father was orphaned as a young man, his mother dying of tuberculosis when he was ten and his father dying of a broken heart, or perhaps smoking too many unfiltered Chesterfields. My maternal grandmother was deaf and the family refused to invest in hearing aids, so they created their own sign language and she eventually learned how to lip read. My maternal grandfather went to war and never came back to his family, but instead created a new mysterious one that my mother met in her fifties. My own parents met on a beach when they were thirteen as my maternal grandmother tried to pick up my paternal grandfather over a bag of pretzels.

I am a survivor.

In college I travelled the US working on a documentary on Savant Syndrome, moved to London after I was raped as an intern by a colleague at CBS, and quit my job to stay with my roommate’s family in Dublin after he committed suicide at twenty-three—searching for answers to how one’s mind can turn on them in such drastic ways. When my ex-boyfriend died right before I turned thirty, I stopped drinking and started writing and never looked back. The writing began as a way to heal, and over time has become a vehicle to help others heal.

I am a teaching artist.

Through my own difficulties as a student sharing my writing, being vulnerable, and feeling ashamed of my poor technical skills as a writer, I help lift up the stories of the students I teach, curating story slams and bringing to light the fact that their voices matter. Simply stated, I try to be the teacher I was looking for when I was finding my own authentic voice. I’m humbled by everything my students teach me and continue to be inspired by their stories. My life has markers of pain and lanes of joy, as a life tends to have. I used to numb- out my feelings, but now focus on my deep gratitude for being able to witness it all. My writing is a mosaic of those who came before me, those who will come after, and all those I hope to meet. I’m an artist and that’s my profound statement.