Ever since my graduation from Fordham University, I've worked full time. All of my jobs have been in communications--I've worked as a newspaper journalist, a magazine editor, free-lance feature writer, beauty and fashion copywriter, in corporate public relations, etc. My current position, directing the public relations program for Hunter College, the largest college in the City University of New York, is the most satisfying of my career. It also places the greatest demands on my time. The result is that I struggle to make time for my other work as a poet. Ironically, if I hadn't joined Hunter and received the generous encouragement of several poets on the faculty in the early nineties, I wouldn't be juggling my two lives. I'd still be writing poems sporadically, a few a year, then filing them away unread, as I had done since my adolescence. Without a doubt, I'm glad I have this problem, because poetry has become my life's passion.

Now I'm trying to make up for the years when poetry wasn't central to my life. In 1997, I had my first big breakthrough--two poems published in the May issue of Poetry (another was published there in December 1999). Since then, I've amassed a good deal of writing credits in national magazines and in two anthologies and, almost to my surprise, I now have a full-length poetry manuscript, The Bodies We Were Loaned. The title, taken from the last line of my poem "In Standard Time," which won the 1998 Allen Tate Memorial Poetry Award, represents a recurring theme in my work.

I've also discovered that I love to read before a live audience, and have derived great pleasure from invitations to read my poems at Barnes & Noble and other bookstores and cafes in New York, and, most recently, at Hunter College.