I live with my husband, son, daughter, and dogs in Wellsboro, PA. We have 13 bikes (I'm only counting the working ones), three kayaks, one SUP, and too much camping gear. My life revolves around good friends who don't expect my house to be clean, outside play (on the rocks, under water, in the mud, on ice, up in trees), local food, campfires, community theater, music, and stories. Recently I've started hunting (I only shoot what I'll eat) and fishing as I explore what it means to be of this place: Tioga County, Pennsylvania. I recently became associate publisher at Mountain Home magazine, where I'd been a freelance writer for a few years. Before that, I taught part-time at Mansfield University in Creative Writing, Outdoor Recreation Leadership, and Women's Studies. My courses included Rock Climbing, Poetry Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Fiction Writing, and Women Outdoors. I still teach writing workshops, freelance write, and work at Pine Creek Outfitters as a weekend warrior.
My adventure memoir, When Everything Beyond the Walls Is Wild: Being a Woman Outdoors in America, came out in 2019. I enjoy visiting classes to talk about gender, outdoor recreation, and wildness/wilderness, as well as giving readings. I've presented at several schools including Appalachian State University, Warren Wilson College, Corning Community College, Mansfield University, and Western Carolina University (before the pandemic caused events to be canceled). The book has been used in a variety of college classes, and I'm happy to do free virtual visits to any classes for which it is assigned, such as I did at UC Davis.
Ever since receiving my MFA from the University of California, Irvine, I've been publishing poetry. In 2015 I was co-winner of the Helen Kay Chapbook Poetry Prize, and Young at the Time of Letting Go was published by Evening Street Press. My focus has turned to ecojustice poetry and poems that consider the challenges of raising children in a time of climate change.
How did I end up specializing in the ecotone where gender and the outdoors overlap? While studying literature and environment at the University of Nevada, Reno, I researched and wrote about wilderness, gender and outdoor spaces, and teaching sense of place. And before that, I was a founding member of the Outdoor Academy of the Southern Appalachians, a residential school for tenth graders, where I taught Literature of the Land, as well as Environmental Seminar. The program is still going strong and is a brilliant example of interdisciplinary experiential education. The three years I taught (and learned) there shaped me more than any other experience as an adult, until parenting.
I'm a proud member of the Pennsylvania Outdoor Writers Association and am currently working on a collection of sketches documenting the unique people I've met and amusing lessons I've learned raising my kids in a small town that is no where near a big city but is full of wild life, wild beauty, and gives me wild hope for the future.
My adventure memoir, When Everything Beyond the Walls Is Wild: Being a Woman Outdoors in America, came out in 2019. I enjoy visiting classes to talk about gender, outdoor recreation, and wildness/wilderness, as well as giving readings. I've presented at several schools including Appalachian State University, Warren Wilson College, Corning Community College, Mansfield University, and Western Carolina University (before the pandemic caused events to be canceled). The book has been used in a variety of college classes, and I'm happy to do free virtual visits to any classes for which it is assigned, such as I did at UC Davis.
Ever since receiving my MFA from the University of California, Irvine, I've been publishing poetry. In 2015 I was co-winner of the Helen Kay Chapbook Poetry Prize, and Young at the Time of Letting Go was published by Evening Street Press. My focus has turned to ecojustice poetry and poems that consider the challenges of raising children in a time of climate change.
How did I end up specializing in the ecotone where gender and the outdoors overlap? While studying literature and environment at the University of Nevada, Reno, I researched and wrote about wilderness, gender and outdoor spaces, and teaching sense of place. And before that, I was a founding member of the Outdoor Academy of the Southern Appalachians, a residential school for tenth graders, where I taught Literature of the Land, as well as Environmental Seminar. The program is still going strong and is a brilliant example of interdisciplinary experiential education. The three years I taught (and learned) there shaped me more than any other experience as an adult, until parenting.
I'm a proud member of the Pennsylvania Outdoor Writers Association and am currently working on a collection of sketches documenting the unique people I've met and amusing lessons I've learned raising my kids in a small town that is no where near a big city but is full of wild life, wild beauty, and gives me wild hope for the future.
