My specialty is versatility. Insatiably curious, I’ve written on everything from winemakers to wildlife veterinarians, snapping turtles to sleep doctors, and a 2,700-year-old mummy diagnosed with heart disease. I am drawn to stories about conservation and the natural world in particular, and consuming passions in general.  I also write broadly about science, technology, medicine, education, arts, and food and culture. I particularly like tackling complex or technical topics and making them accessible to a general reader.

I am a freelance writer, a contributing editor for Virginia Living magazine (for which I write the regular “natives” column profiling Virginia’s native flora and fauna), and I was previously a feature contributor for Washington Post “Weekend,” for which I wrote on topics as widely varied as the Solar Decathlon (an international university-level competition to design and build solar homes) , old-time music in Floyd, VA, and the footloose life of the young, bright, and unattached in Washington, DC.

I served as the Writer-in-Residence at Sabot at Stony Point School from 2013 to 2017, and I formerly taught writing, editing, and literature at Randolph-Macon College. Today I continue to work one-on-one as a writing coach and developmental editor for grades 7 through adult.

With two degrees in English (BA, Williams College, MA, George Mason University), I favor the Oxford comma, Garner’s Modern American Usage, and National Grammar Day. I sometimes put two spaces after the period.

When I’m not writing, I like to be in my kitchen baking, out on my bike riding, in the pool swimming — or, particularly, out in the wild as a competitive (relatively speaking) open-water swimmer, an obsession born of a story I wrote for the Washington Post. I’ve swum across the Chesapeake Bay and under the George Washington Bridge and somehow that was my idea of a good time.