Growing up in Steamboat Springs, Colorado,

I dabbled in a myriad of activities the Rocky Mountains offered: extreme sledding, alpine skinny-dipping, and s’more making. I learned how to race mountain bikes and build trails. I constructed snow forts with the precision of a civil engineer. Pre-Y2K, my friends and I would lay in the middle of main street any night of the summer and watch the stoplights blink yellow, not a soul in sight. Later, life in Portland, Oregon taught me to look both ways and use crosswalks. And in doing so, I found jazz clubs, vegan poutine, bike lanes, and fern-lined forests.

I recently counted: I have lived in 30 different houses since I was 18. Everett Crowdog (part Dalmatian, part fawn) has lived in at least 25 of those houses with me. After well over a decade of sharing a pillow with him, I have come to learn it really is possible to love something more every day. Other things I love: my family, the ohm of a Harley engine, skis with 110+mm underfoot (and powder days that justify them), and nearly every kind of writing.

Writing has made sense to me since I first learned how to hold a pencil. There are boxes of short stories, poems, letters, diaries, and dream journals in my mother’s attic. In 3rd grade I entered a statewide poetry contest and won. In high school I joined a teen writing club for the local newspaper and published my first column. In college I worked as a student editor for the academic writing center. By graduate school, I published research in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

I love writing because it blossoms ideas into action, data into results, and emotions into poetry. Strong writing is hard to find these days. Most of us correspond through quick texts, photo captions, and status updates. Our emails succumb to formalities or curtness. Yet we need writing like we need water. It’s a lifeline, and our survival as an intellectual species depends on excellent communication, no matter the mechanism.

My mission is not just to survive, but to thrive—which I do through writing, exploring, and of course, making time for a good, cold skinny dip.

RESUME | LINKEDIN