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I am a writer.
I have always been a writer. Family legend has it that I began writing before I could read - inventing my own set of pictographs to express myself.
My first publication was at age nine (a poem) and my first paid publication at twelve (an essay). I spent much of junior high and high school years in the library reading biographies and history and writing my first novel. At age seventeen I started publishing my own science fiction magazine, was an award winning writer and editor of the high school paper, editor of the high school literary anthology, and "cub" reporter for the local town paper. I graduated high school with a thick "clip file" and a journalism scholarship for college. I later left college to take a full time job with a local daily newspaper and continue my own magazine.
At age twenty-two I moved to California to take the Managing Editor position at a publishing trade magazine. I later returned to college at the University of California where I continued to work freelance for local newspapers while receiving bachelor degrees in Professional Writing and Anthropology and working as a writing tutor and teaching assistant on campus. Having been an activist since early childhood (second generation feminist), I had started an organization called the Body Image Task Force while still an undergraduate. As the organization grew, I became not only the Director of BITF, but a primary lecturer and writer in the area of body image.
It was the continued drive to write and teach that led me on to graduate school in the feminist track of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Iowa. I have since given hundreds of lectures, taught workshops and classes, as well as published journals and books.
Writing and teaching are at the core of who I am and how I interact with the world.
Last revised 3/8/2006