My main focus of writing has been poetry, but with Finding the Raven, I've branched out into fiction using the skills I've learned studying poetic imagery. I was inspired by my grandparents' era, and most particularly by my great uncle, who was a hobo and wrote of his travels to the St. Louis World's Fair and across the country to live with Native Americans. I imagined who he might've seen in St. Louis and what he might have done, though he didn't appear as a main character in the book. I enjoyed researching the times, and at the SIU Library I found newspapers from April 1904. I wondered what it would be like to have answered ads from the classifieds at that time. So in my story, I used actual excerpts from the old newspapers and went in search of "what if."

My second book of poetry, Painting the Egret's Echo, won the Library of Poetry Book Award for 2012 from the Bitter Oleander Press, and I was the featured poet in their Spring 2014 issue. Other awards include the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest in the Best Sonnet category, the ISPS poetry contest for 2012, Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award for 2010, and a nomination for an Illinois Arts Council Award. Other poetry books are Lacing Through Time (Bellowing Ark Press, 2011), and a chapbook, Word Paintings, (Snark Publishing, 2002). I graduated from the Creative Writing Program at Southern Illinois University.