I was a kid who loved to read. In the third grade I read a simple biography of Louisa May Alcott and decided I wanted to grow up to be a writer. But life intervened, and when I realized I couldn’t pay the rent by writing, I got a teaching certificate in English. In Virginia and Texas I taught middle schoolers and high schoolers how to write for high school and college. When I wasn’t grading papers or making lesson plans, I scribbled poems and short stories. In the summers I began graduate work. When I was offered a position teaching freshman composition at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, I accepted it. Little did I know I would stay at NAU for almost thirty years. During those years, I taught undergrads how to write for a variety of disciplines and graduate students how to do research and write dissertations. I also married and raised a daughter. In 1985 with two colleagues—one a high school English teacher and the other a member of the Education faculty at NAU—I established the Northern Arizona Writing Project, an intensive writing-across-the-curriculum program for public school teachers. Electing to publish rather than perish (i.e. lose my job at the university), I wrote a variety of articles and two textbooks (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997, 2004) on the teaching of writing. In my elusive spare time I continued to write short stories and poems, which began to be published in periodicals like Mystery Time, Inklings, English International, and Sojourners. As the years progressed, however, I became increasingly frustrated by my inability to teach and write long fiction concurrently, sometimes kidding that my magnum opus would be The Collected Handouts. When that joke threatened to become reality, I left teaching to write full-time. I’ve written a variety of freelance articles for publications like Quilt World, Evergreen Newspapers, and Guahan Magazine, but my heart has always be in fiction. My debut novel, The Copper Box, was published in June, 2017, and is available on Amazon. Though my roots are in Arizona and most of my stories are set in the Southwest, I now live and write in the gentle Ouachita Mountains of central Arkansas.
In addition to being published in fiction, I also have two nonfiction books:
A passionate reader, I began writing as a young girl. After graduating from college, I became a teacher. Over the course of my career, I taught high schoolers, college undergraduates, and public school teachers how to write personal narratives, expository and persuasive essays, as well as poetry and short fiction. I continued to write: publishing professional articles, two textbooks, short stories, and poetry. In 2013, I won first place in Romantic Suspense in the ACFW Genesis Contest.