About Me

I am a writer, currently working on a memoir and a work of fiction. Having sold my business as former owner of Bank Square Books in Mystic, Connecticut, Savoy Bookshop & Cafe in Westerly, RI and Title IX in New London, CT, I am off on a new path of creativity.

For eleven years, I served as a Director of the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (BINC), and the American Booksellers Association and president of the board of the New England Independent Booksellers Association.

With my love of reading over 200 books a year, I served as a judge for both the Kirkus Book Awards in 2015 and the National Book Awards in 2016 as well as numerous committees and task forces with the American Booksellers Association.

In the past I have worked as a translator aboard a Soviet fish processor, as a scientific fishery observer, and with esteemed landscape artists Pepe Maynard and Peter Cummings as a landscape designer, an administrator for the Small Business Development Center, among many other things.

In my free time, I love to read, write, garden, swim, paint and travel. I now live in Mt Vernon Washington, in the Skagit Valley with ten chickens, a fruit orchard and gardens where I can now grow sweet peas to smell their fragrance. Closer to the roads of my childhood and to family, and to the island I love.

In April and May of 2025 I sailed around the west coast of the Svalbard Archipelago near the North Pole with the Arctic Circle Residency. After five or so years of thinking about applying to this residency, to fulfill a dream of traveling to the Arctic, selling my bookstore business allowed me to shed my skin of retail to focus on my creative side, writing and thinking about our world. Having studied and fallen in love with the Arctic and Russia in every way many years ago, I could not wait to revisit it before this icebound world may disappear with climate change.

My goal on this voyage was to work on the structure my current memoir, to follow the thread of women who were key to the expeditions to the Arctic in the 18th-20th centuries but rarely mentioned nor written about. If I can bring them to life in writing, I’ll be happy to bring their memories to life; women such as Wanny Woldstad, Leonie d’Aunet, Christiane Ritter and many more. Stay tuned as I discover more of their stories to add to mine.