After growing up spending my summers sailing along the Jersey shore, I couldn’t quell my love for sailing, even just capturing the feeling of being on the water, and I found myself returning to it over and over again—in writing. While studying creative writing at Wake Forest University, I gravitated to writing poetry and short stories with strong nautical imagery (according to Rikki Ducornet, I suppose you might consider this a strong feature of my “deep zoo”), but the drive took to new heights during my time in Oxford for my post-grad program—a classic case of “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

Between 2016 and 2021, I sketched out multiple drafts for the manuscript I’m currently querying, building a world to a level of detail that many stories live and breathe there now, with the even the ship setting becoming a character in her own right. I love delving deep in the details of a world, and considering the systems and histories that build a setting and society into what it becomes when we meet it on the page, or in our lived experience!

Aside from building fictional realms and the waters we cross to reach them, I enjoy writing poetry and short stories, both with a healthy dose of an experimental style and a yearning tone. When I’m not writing, I am an enthusiastic participant in stress-baking, running along Brooklyn’s waterfront, and singing off-key to my plants.