I’ve always loved words, though I have a mouth like a closed book.

It started when my mom signed me up for a creative writing class at Avon High School in Connecticut. I learned that writing is a way to put ideas into language.

The following summer, I brought a folder of my poems and stories to Center for Creative Youth at Wesleyan University, was accepted into the creative writing program, and saw my first haiku published by summer’s end.

The road bent. I earned a Bachelor of Science in International Business from Ithaca College, then a Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies, field of Dramatic Arts from Harvard University. I learned to write the language of business plans and requests for proposals alongside the language of Shakespeare and philosophy.

I lived on both American coasts and in Eastern Europe. Back in California, in a creative writing course at Orange Coast College, I opened two decades’ worth of notebooks that had waited in suitcases, unpublished.

I am still learning the craft. From those years on the page comes my first book of poems, Lashes of the Tongue.

Widener Library, Harvard University (2016)