About
I am a poet and artist living and working in San Francisco's North Beach in a flat overlooking Alcatraz and the Bay. After earning my MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, I spent years writing, teaching writing, and working as both a book reviewer and a moderator for mother-daughter book clubs. My poems have been published in a number of literary journals and anthologies, including Hunger Mountain, Brevity, Poets Eleven, Coffee Poems from World Enough Writers, Stone Gathering and Rattle Magazine. My chapbook, 11,000 Cups Of Tea can be viewed at The Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Project:
https://www.sketchbookproject.com/library/S212075
My collage making originally started as part of a poetry project; I was playing around with writing poems in a collaged format and thought it would be fun to try some visual collages that translated as poems to go with them—so, poems as collages and collages as poems. I had also recently become keeper of our old family photo albums and found myself pouring over photos of my grandparents and great grandparents, great aunts and uncles, cousins in various categories of removal and my parents in their youth, wondering about their hopes and dreams and all of the “what-ifs” and forks in the road not taken. With scissors and glue, a mishmash of found images from the public domain and commercial sources, my own photography and the old photos of my relatives, the collages started to tell an entertaining alternative version of my own family history. Instead of poems, they became small visual stories akin to flash fiction but in picture form, animating my ancestors in ways they might never have imagined but hopefully might have enjoyed at least half as much as I have. I’ve since incorporated vintage portraits in the public domain, moving beyond my documented family portraits to a broader scope of reimagined lives.