I grew up in California, six blocks from the ocean. I spent my youth riding my bike, reading incessantly, and sun tanning at the beach, always with friends, and never with the benefit of sunscreen. My undergrad days were spent at University of California at Irvine where I studied English with a writing emphasis and then I studied at UC Santa Cruz taking a degree in education. I imagined I would be a teacher like my mother, or maybe I would write for magazines, but, as an only child of a single, hard working mom, what I really wanted to do was to stay at home with my children, and that worked out for our family. I gardened, cooked, volunteered at their school. When my youngest entered preschool, I took a writing class and then I took another. Soon I gave up gardening and took up early rising until my morning shufflings--making coffee, letting the dog out, writing at my desk--woke the household at five. With my kids in elementary school I wrote in coffeehouses and at the library, in the parking lot where I waited for them after school. I published in small journals, The Bellingham Review, Inkwell Magazine, Third Coast, Fourth Genre, Hunger Mountain, to name a few, and the publications sustained me. They allowed me to continue believing in my work and led me to pursue an MFA in fiction at Warren Wilson College. I was lucky enough to win some prizes, John Steinbeck Award, Tobias Wolff Award, H.E. Francis Award, I was short listed in Best American Short Stories. Through the raising of my family I continued writing. Now as my youngest enters college and I teeter on the cusp of an empty nest and a new decade of my life, my collection, SHOUT HER LOVELY NAME is forthcoming with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. There's a lovely symmetry to my timeline and if I wrote it in a story, no one would believe it.