ABOUT ME
Have you ever felt you've lived many different lives?
Growing up near the ocean on Long Island with an actor father and an English teacher mother gave me a taste for dramatic, endless expanses and the words with which to express them. As a backstage brat, my first influences were Shakespeare and the Bible, as evinced by the thee’s, thou’s and wherefore’s of my 8-year-old poetry. As a kid and teen, I worked on stage (off and on Broadway) and studied modern dance with Martha Graham and her troupe.
Poetry was my first love and after making the mature decision to become a starving poet instead of a starving dancer, I earned an MFA from Columbia University. The dawning realization that I actually had to make money closely followed. I started teaching at various colleges and quickly settled at NYU’s Stern Graduate School of Business Administration, where I taught Business Writing.
Having always been a person of business perspicacity (I saved all my youthful earnings and refused to allow my parents to take a cut), at once I discovered I enjoyed the entrepreneurial spirit and created my own consulting business. I helped professionals at IBM, The Ford Foundation, Scholastic Inc., Girl Scouts of America, and various other businesses to improve their writing and presentation skills.
I began writing and publishing articles and eventually earned my MS in Journalism, also from Columbia, where I won a Horgan Award for Science Writing. Always a science and medicine buff, I wrote many book chapters for medical texts as well as health articles. My work for hire also included writing educational materials for Scholastic and other companies.
At the American Red Cross in Greater New York, where I worked as Acting Director of Public Relations, I learned the ins and outs of promotional writing, and at Scholastic, where I served as an Editorial Director, I furthered my career in writing educational materials.
These days, in New York City and upstate New York, I work mostly on books. I helped an amazing young man with muscular dystrophy write his memoir, which his parents published. I'm working on fiction and was honored with a "Top 25" in a Glimmer Train short story contest.
EDUCATION SUMMARY
MS Journalism – Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
MA English – New York University
MFA Poetry – Columbia Graduate School of the Arts
BA Psychology and Philosophy of Values – Kenyon College