I was born in a hospital in Detroit, Michigan, on November 16, 1973.

I was fortunate to attend some very good schools and to have some excellent teachers.  I went to college thinking I wanted to be an engineer, and in my sixteen-year-old mind, my primary concern was picking a place where I'd be least likely to see anybody from high school.  I went to Penn State at University Park, smack in the middle of Pennsylvania.  (Success:  I never saw anybody from my high school.)

I changed my major from Engineering to Biochemistry and Chemistry - I'd fallen in love with molecules and dreamed about them nightly.  I'd planned to get my Ph.D. in Pharmacology, eager to do work with viruses (at the time, I thought I'd work on AIDS).  I was obsessed with proteins and structure-function relationships, and I wanted to design drugs.

I stayed for an extra year past when I'd earned my two bachelor's degrees in order to finish up a research project I'd been working on (completing studies on an MRI contrast agent I'd designed and synthesized).  I taught some introductory Biochemistry courses, too.  While I was there, I decided I may as well earn a minor in something - I settled on English, as I'd always loved to write, and I hadn't had much time to take literature courses during my science studies.  I was all set to go to Yale the next fall, to begin my Ph.D. in Pharmacology.

...Then came the Big Mistake.  Falling in love with poetry was an accident.  Poetry sought me out and found me and wouldn't leave me alone.  My dreams about molecules slowly got replaced by dreams about poems.  Poetry kept me up nights past 3 a.m., to 4, and 5, and 6 a.m., reading, and thinking, and reading some more; and eating corn and beans out of cans, and drinking tea, and coke with vanilla.

I remember reading Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "At the Fishhouses," by the light of a laser in an otherwise pitch-black room while collecting data for my research project.  That's when all the trouble began.  "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / element bearable to no mortal," ... "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / the clear gray icy water ... Back, behind us," ... "It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:  / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, / drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world, derived from the rocky breasts / forever, flowing and drawn, and since / our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown."  I knew science, in a way, was behind me, then; and I knew poetry was the difficult path ahead.  It wasn't a choice.  I felt science had prepared me for poetry.  I understood that poetry was science's purpose, for me.  My mind was ready to do the work of poetry.  Nothing was harder than poetry - discovering something, and sticking with it, seeing it through, and getting it right.  Observing the world, and staying, and staying, and finally articulating it.  The truth.

Nearly twelve years later, I've lived in many places (including a cabin in Vermont for three years), worked many jobs, and I've earned my MFA in Creative Writing - Poetry (from Syracuse University).  I've written a book of poems for which I'm seeking a publisher; a chapbook of my poems is forthcoming from Turtle Ink Press.  I teach poetry workshops at the Downtown Writers' Center in Syracuse, New York, and I teach writing and literature courses at SUNY-ESF (College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry) and at Le Moyne College.  I also do a lot of work with children - this past year, for example, I worked with elementary students at Delaware Academy and with middle school students at Shea and Grant Middle Schools.  I just finished the U.S. Poet Laureate Project, Literacy Through Creative Expression, working with a science teacher at Shea Middle School - the students explored the connections between science and poetry, and composed their own poems.

... And I'm still writing.