About
As the self-appointed President of the St. Michael’s second grade Ranger Rick Club, I always knew I was destined for something big. I wrote my first book—The Story of My Life. A True Story.— at age eight on orange construction paper that was hole-punched and tied with ribbon, which my mother lovingly preserved. The back jacket cover promised the book “Could change your life, just as it changed Katrina’s because she put it down on paper and let her feelings show.” It was a few decades later, however, before my first novel, Parting Gifts was published (She Writes Press, April 2016.) My personal essays have been featured in numerous anthologies, including Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis: Women Writers Respond to the Call, My Other Ex: Women’s True Stories of Leaving and Losing Friends, and Nothing but the Truth So Help Me God, and I have been published in the New York Times, HuffPost, YourTango, and Mamalode.
My writing has been shared on Jennifer Pastiloff’s The Manifest-Station (author of On Being Human), Rachel Macy Stafford’s Hands Free Mama (NYT bestselling author of Hands Free Mama, Hands Free Life, Only Love Today, and Live Love Now), and Indy’s Child website.
In 2016, I was recognized as one of six distinguished authors at the Indianapolis Book & Author luncheon—joining the ranks of past recipients, Elizabeth Berg, Maria de los Santos, Anna Quindlen, Anita Shreve, and Taylor Jenkins Reid—and I was named a BlogHer 2015: Experts Among Us “Voice of the Year.” I was awarded the 2014 Parenting Media Association’s Gold Medal Blogger Award, participated in the 2013 “Listen to Your Mother” show, and was a 2011 Midwest Writers Fellow. I was named a 2017 Greenfield Central High School Hall of Fame Alumni for my writing accolades, and I have studied with authors Cheryl Strayed, Lidia Yuknavitch, Dorothy Allison, Pam Houston, Steve Almond, (the late) Richard McCann, and Connie May Fowler.
I currently live and travel full-time in my fifth wheel with my two special needs rescue dogs, Ruby and Sissy. I write semi-regularly at Surrendering to Sappho on Substack, and I am still eager for someone to option the movie rights to the 1979 version of The Story of My Life. A True Story.
Featured Work
PARTING GIFTS
Broken by their unorthodox Midwestern childhood, sisters Catherine, Anne, and Jessica Mathers search for love, acceptance, and worth―often in the most unlikely places. Catherine, the oldest of the Mathers sisters, is an English professor battling breast cancer with Cytoxan, red wine, and profanity. Anne is a wife and stay-at-home mother of two struggling to make ends meet in a suburban existence that both suffocates and confounds her. Jessica, the youngest by ten years and estranged―by choice―from her family, is an exotic dancer who feels safer on stage than in a relationship. But when the sisters are faced with an incomprehensible loss, they are forced to reevaluate themselves, their damaged bonds, and their fragile future. PARTING GIFTS illuminates one highly dysfunctional family’s tentative, desperate crawl toward a life of meaning and worth.
