As a very young child, mom took me to the library every week to get 7 new books, and she would read one to me every night before bed. This is how I learned to read and write well before kindergarten. I always enjoyed drawing and writing to tell stories, but in third grade my teacher gave us the homework assignment of writing a lullaby. After we had turned it in and it had been graded, my teacher came to my desk to ask me if I really wrote the lullaby. I told her honestly that I had. She showed the Principal, who had me tested for the gifted program, and I was accepted. From that day, I wrote. In middle school, I wrote a series of YA novels about a band director who toted a Glock and drove a red Ferrari (on a teacher's salary??), and lived in an inexplicable (and unexplained) mansion at the edge of a small rural town. She stalked and kidnapped her students, putting them in the "torture halls" that existed beneath her mansion, as a test of the students' mettle. In 2014, I had my first traditional publication of a poem. Since then I have published 17 short stories and poems in literary magazines, and in 2023 published my first novel.
