About

I’m passionate about finding and telling stories, putting words on a page. I worked two years as an award-winning staff writer at the Chattanooga Times Free Press and have been published in Salt Magazine, Clamor Magazine, Port City Life Magazine and Patagonia Black Sheep.

In September 2007, I accepted a job offer in the Chilean Patagonia, close to the southern tip of the South American continent (read: glaciers! penguins!). I worked at marketing and conservation in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, then backpacked with my sister for several months through Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. All the while, I kept this blog and collected notes and information for travel articles.

I was born and raised in the mid-sized southern city of Greensboro, North Carolina. My family’s frequent backpacking and paddling trips in the Appalachian Mountains instilled in me a love of the outdoors and sense of adventure that I’ve carried into my professional life. I spent five summers leading trips in the woods — most recently, 25-day backpacking, mountaineering, rock climbing and mountain biking trips for teenagers in the Pacific Northwest — and I love to write about the outdoors and outdoor activities.

After graduating with an English degree from Davidson College, a 1,600-student liberal arts school in North Carolina, I studied in the writing program at the Salt Institute of Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine. There, I spent a lot of time in jail to write a documentary article about three inmates near release at the state’s prison farm.

I have a lot of experience writing news on deadline and asking hard questions; As the K-12 education reporter at the Times Free Press in Chattanooga, I wrote about about subjects ranging from school board decisions to teenage pregnancy in the schools.

In addition, I’ve written features about everything from hiking trails in Italy to dodgeball tournaments in Tennessee to the Maine delicacy known as the Whoopie Pie. I’ve profiled goat cheese makers, tattoo artists and an amputee rock climber and written arts and entertainment previews and personal columns.

Basically, I love a good story, and I’ll go to all lengths to find it and tell it well. Please contact me if you’d like to talk travel writing… or if you’d just like to share stories.