I'm a working writer, born and raised in Seattle. Port cities are my favorite, and if I’m away from water for too long, well, life is just a little less than. When I'm not writing I box, remodel houses, and teach writing. The last thing I learned how to do was paddle-boarding, and the next thing I’m going to learn how to do is welding.

I graduated cum laude from Western Washington University with a bachelor's degree in history and a minor in music; I did post-bacc work in the Near Eastern Studies Department (Assyriology) at Johns Hopkins University, and in creative writing at the University of Washington; I earned a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. I’ve taught writing in K-12 classrooms, undergraduate classrooms and graduate programs, and am in the process of getting certified as a Wired for Reading specialist.