I'm a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and an award-winning writer with an extensive teaching background in creative writing and English. I help my students trust the process of writing to lead to unexpected places and unexpected knowledge--observations and insights that are theirs alone but that could only be revealed by engaging in the act of writing. By prizing originality and leaping forward, my students learn to release their experience of the world onto the page. In later drafts, I help them shape the vision they express by applying techniques and skills. Craft comes into play. But starting out is always a matter of letting the imagination take control. I encourage my students to tap into a part of themselves that they might otherwise not know they contain.
Individuals I've taught have moved on to boast achievements such as acceptance to the highly competitive Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets (a renowned summer poetry program) and NYU's esteemed graduate creative writing program.
My own successes include awards such as the Iowa Book Prize for my first collection of poetry, a fellowship in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Nation magazine's Discovery/92nd Street Y Poetry Prize, and more.