My poems can be found in my chapbook Familiar History, available from Finishing Line Press.

They can be found in print in Sugar House Review (issue #6), Reed (issue 63), Redactions (issue 12), The Santa Clara Review (issue 96), Harpur Palate (issue 16.1), Sow’s Ear Poetry Review (issue 27.3), Louisiana Literature (issue 37.2), and After Happy Hour (issue 18).

They can also be found in online journals such as Eclectica, Slant, Gloom Cupboard, The 2River View, Haikuniverse, Pif Magazine, The Adirondack Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Adelaide Literary Magazine.

This Isn’t Robert Frost

Most contemporary poetry doesn’t rhyme the way poems taught in school often do. It’s usually written in free verse—lines shaped by breath, pressure, and sound rather than set meters. The poems still care about music, but they aren’t trying to follow inherited rules. They’re trying to tell the truth in language that fits the lives being described.

What I Write About: ‘Struggle and Failure and Broken Lives’

When asked to describe my chapbook Familiar History, my teacher Corrinne Clegg Hales said the poems “de-romanticize the landscape and mythology of the American West, revealing a world defined largely by struggle and failure and broken lives.” I think that’s right.

I was raised in a poor, rural part of northern Nevada. The West I knew didn’t look like the movies. It wasn’t clean or heroic. People worked hard, drank hard, fought hard, and got hurt. Families broke down. Money ran out. The land didn’t offer much forgiveness.

Growing up, I watched the same Westerns everyone else did, men like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood who never seemed to bleed, no matter what they faced. But in the town where I was born, Fallon, Nevada, people did bleed. Often it was for nothing. The version of the American Dream we were promised never really showed up.

That gap, between the stories we’re told and the lives people actually live, is where my poems begin.