A former Clinical Psychologist, sailor and bicyclist , I make my home with my husband in the Greater West Palm Beach, Florida. 

we skinny dip
in the community pool
full moon

Frogpond, 2009

I started writing both free verse and short forms in 1999. I had always wanted to write novels but was hit with a neuroimmune illness in 1990, causing fatigue, dizziness, inability to tolerate light and sound. It took nine years for a doctor to find a med with anti-seizure/neuro calming properties that helped me regain my ability to use the computer and become clearheaded enough to write again. Anything long was too challenging, so I started dabbling with very bad haiku and was gradually able to write more and better over time as long as I paced my energy. Many writers taught me and encouraged me along the way, as did reading good work.  I especially love writing tanka, tanka prose, haibun, and creating haiga. In my earlier years I wrote more free verse.

Haigaonline 2016

As a result, my free verse and short forms have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as Eucalypt, GUSTS, PoetsArtists, Nixes Mate, Mayfly, Rusty Truck, Drifting Sands, Presence, Frogpond, Acorn, and Outlaw Poetry. Nominated seven times for a Pushcart, the Small Press has published seven collections of my free verse poetry and one book of tanka. My Southern Childhood, from Nixes Mate Press is my most recent book. In 2021 I was thrilled to take first place in the Marlene Mountain monoku contest and the Sanford Goldstein tanka competition.

Below are some samples of my work . . .

the constancy of change

autumn, and the florida heat still has its way with us. soon the snowbirds will be creeping in to hide from the northern cold. already, a giant blue heron has checked out the pond behind our house where baby moorhens have been growing, preparing to leave for a new spot in these southern climes. 

goodbyes come in heavy doses. I think of friends dead just since january, one friend lost so suddenly to dementia, the stories I still want to share with them. to console myself I think of my father’s old garden, silver queen corn in his arms, rushing inside to toss the husked cobs into boiling water before sugar turned to starch. 

I’m grateful I also gathered the many sweetnesses passing through my life in time.

nightfall
a newborn’s cry drifts
through my window

Failed Haiku, November 2021

my old home sits
next to unturned soil
string beans
and silver queen corn
long for my father’s hand

First place—2021 Sanford Goldstein Contest

Damaged

Broken diamonds fill the sky. Wild horses thunder past on the beach. Surf drenches my calves. I want him back but the gulls cry no, no as they flap across the fading horizon. His loss washes over me until I want to give up, be carried helplessly out to sea with the mermaids. I collapse into the tidal pools until the sky turns pink again. Dying starfish wash up to shore. His ash settles over me, warming me.

autumn winds
the empty nest
blows away 

Frogpond, 2021

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