I’m truly a small-town girl from a 2 stoplight town in Western New York.
Living closer to Canada than New York City meant I was ready to see everything
I could by the time I could walk.

I am blessed with parents who valued education (2 public school teachers for 30+ years) and so our summers were filled with trips to Plymouth Rock, the Freedom Trail, Gettysburg and more. Plus, the occasional baseball stadium for a game.

My favorite place in the whole world might be London, but the place that is dearest to me is Walt Disney World. My parents first brought me when I was 2 and I realized my dream of working for the Disney company when I did the College Program in 1999. I have always respected and appreciated the vision Walt Disney had for family entertainment and “show”.

I’ve gone to school … a lot! I loved school as a kid, even if I did get bullied on the bus. Writing and reading were my favorites. And at about the age of 10 I discovered I could sing - like really sing. This started a love affair that continues to this day with musical theater and the performing arts. I studied voice performance professionally from the age of 14 and attended Carnegie Mellon University (first school of higher education) for 2.5 years as a voice performance major. However, I left CMU to do College Program - my own version of running away to the circus.

After College Program, I moved back home to New York for a short stint and then transferred to the University of South Florida to finish my undergraduate degree. I switched majors to Public Relations and minored in Technical Writing. I had my most favorite job ever on campus as a copywriter and later opinion editor of USF’s The Oracle, the student-run newspaper. I also worked part-time at The Disney Store so I was still getting my Disney fix and driving to Orlando for trips to the parks whenever I could.

My first real job was at an advertising agency in Tampa, and man, did that job teach me a lot. I credit my leaders there, Tracy and Tina with really helping to develop some of my most important professional habits. I also met a lifelong friend there who was hired about a year after I started. She is still one of the best people I have ever met.

Eventually, I was ready to leave the agency job, and ready for a break from Florida. It was around this time that I really got into fan fiction (to be fair, I’d been writing Star Wars fanfic for years, I just didn’t know that’s what it was called). Through the online fanfic community I met some amazing people and decided to pull the trigger and apply for my dream school and my dream degree - a Master’s degree in Writing from the University of Southern California. (George Lucas went to USC, did you know that?)

This necessitated a move to Los Angeles and one of the best periods of my life. I met amazing people in LA. I love being a USC alum, and I’m so glad I took the plunge, uprooted my life and moved across the country. I stayed in LA for about 3.5 years, and then bounced around a bit - moving back to the East Coast (Boston suburbs) and working for my uncle’s software company for a year and then back down to Florida. But the entire time, I was just trying to get back to LA.

One night a friend called and said her company was hiring. She knew how badly I wanted to move back. In just under 4 months, I was back in Los Angeles, this time working on-site at 20th Century Fox. This married my love of movies and Hollywood with a job. My next 5 years in Los Angeles were again some of the best. It was an amazing time - I went to San Diego Comic-Con multiple years in a row, saw stars on the lot, and went to Disneyland when I really needed a pick-me-up from the mouse.

After about 5 more years, I was ready for a change. I had dreamed of working in education for a long time and had found out about the Indiana-Jones-lifestyle of librarians a few years earlier. I applied for and was admitted into the University at Buffalo-SUNY Master’s in Information and Library Science program. I graduated with my Master’s of Science in Information and Library Sciences in May 2021.

Of course there was that pesky pandemic in there and a professional internship at Walt Disney World that was cut short in April 2020. But I have consistently worked or studied for the past 20 years and found fulfillment in so many aspects of these adventures.

Writing is my foundation, but over the past few years I have adjusted my vocabulary and adopted the far more trendy term of “content.” Content creation is all the rage, but no matter the form that content takes, I will always assert it starts with writing.