About

Here’s a bit more about me…

I am the author of the poetry collection The Davids Inside David, JUST RELEASED from Terrapin Books. I am also the author of River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and was published by Red Hen Press in 2015, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published in 2010. I am also Publisher and an Editor at the wonderful poetry press Saturnalia Books. Currently a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, I also hold three other degrees, two of them useless to my current life, an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Berkeley. In a search for sanity, I completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Bennington College while living in Israel.

I grew up a daughter of the American South but, after job-hopping across the Americas and Europe, somehow ended up straddling Manhattan, Tel Aviv, and Rome. My first job after graduating from Georgia Tech was as an engineer in an automotive assembly plant. Several jobs in a diversity of fields including consulting, high technology marketing, investment banking, and venture capital followed. In 2004, I moved to live and work in Tel Aviv, Israel. Perhaps it was the shock of living in a different culture and language that sent me back to poetry and, taking a cue from Richard Hugo who wrote, “Writing is a slow accumulative way of accepting one’s life as valid,” I made a fuller commitment to writing. While living full time in Tel Aviv, I shuttled back and forth between Israel and the US to study literature and writing and, despite what seemed constant jet lag, managed to complete an MFA. My first book, Bathsheba Transatlantic, emerged from those experiences.

I've taught writing workshops and guest lectured at universities in Israel and Italy, and, when I can and in between semesters working on the PhD, still teach creative writing at The American University of Rome. My poetry and criticism has also been published in many international and US journals. I am currently completing a manuscript of poetry dealing with Rome and with the life and works of the great poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.