I was born in Chicago and raised in Evanston, Illinois. In the summer of ’69, I moved west with my family, first to Seattle, then to the San Francisco Bay Area. With one minor and one major exception (a winter in Colorado, six years in Los Angeles), Northern California has been my home ever since.

I studied Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, declared in History, and eventually graduated with a BA in Dramatic Arts. My theatre degree led to an assortment of jobs including house painter, astrologer, waitress, American Sign Language interpreter, administrative assistant, preschool teacher, vocalist, and freelance copyeditor. To be fair, it also got me long-term work as a stage manager (I am a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association) and a 10-year stint as production manager/stage management instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College.

For most of my life, writing was a guilty pleasure I could only indulge sporadically, squeezing it in between my day-job, running a household, and raising two children.

My first published work was a brace of poems in a slim, cheaply-made anthology – Voices of Poetry – that paid in copies. My articles on families and children appeared in Mothering Magazine and Baby Talk. I wrote a few features for the local newspaper, a 28-piece series on the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 for the San Francisco Chronicle, and two educational supplements for the New York Times, one of which (“Children Who Built America”) won First Place in the Best Original Curriculum category at the Newspapers in Education awards.

My novel, the Celtic fantasy Hunter of the Light, was published in 1995 by HarperPrism. Hunter received praise from luminaries in the field and continues to pop up on “best overlooked fantasy” and “favorite book” lists. It garners 5-out-of-5 star ratings from Amazon’s and Goodreads’ reader reviews, and was the inspiration for a fantasy RPG scenario.

Now free of the daily grind, I am – finally – writing full time.

When not working on a novel, I blog under the header Neither Here Nor There, waxing eloquent on politics, the writing process, footy (soccer), paganism, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I take on occasional editing work to keep the cash flowing. To keep the creative juices flowing, I weight train, folk dance, practice Guangping Yang Tai Chi Chu’an, play the bodhrán and, with my husband of nearly 40 years, admire the sunsets from the deck of our Sonoma home.