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 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. (The image at left was taken at dawn, facing north towards the bridge, at the W. 79th Street Boat Basin, as we waited the start of the once and no-longer 10K “Little Red Lighthouse Swim.”)