About

What you’ll find below is a (hopefully) less-boring version of this résumé. 

Being of extremely diminutive stature, I first escaped my hometown of Wheeling, West Virginia by secreting away in a stranger’s carry-on baggage. I came to in Portland, Oregon where I settled for a few years until ultimately heading Midwest-ward, at which point I attended Macalester College, earning a degree in English Literature (cum laude) with focuses in Critical Theory, Film, and Spanish.

Study abroad took me to the University of Yaoundé in Cameroon, where I learned just enough French to throw a wrench in my Spanish. While there an internship with Cambridge University Press gave me the opportunity to peruse stories about political goat races (no typo) that were to be published in a new English-language textbook for African secondary students. My mission, as an outsider, was to pay equal attention to grammatical inconsistencies as to eliminate latent Western cultural bias within the text itself.

Post-graduation, holding down the fort as the resident search engine optimization expert for a A-VIBE Web Development allowed me to hone my technical- and copy-writing skills, particularly as applied to making information “findable” on the web. From there I let my penchant for research and writing creative non-fiction pieces lead me to a position as Senior Writer then Blog Editor with Atlas Obscura, an internet-based resource that is equal parts travel guide and digital wunderkammer.

These days, when not sailing through shark-infested waters, walking overland into Nigeria, or visiting almost every state in the Union, I tarry forth armed with a dry sense of humor and an unreliable camera to record the bizarre, better-than-fiction aspects of life’s daily adventures.

Of my many and varied pursuits, I can most often be found:

  • sweating profusely in the wordsmith’s forge,
  • cooking up a storm,
  • ogling furniture,
  • recruiting unwise friends to accompany me on missions of mischief,
  • riding my bicycle through Minneapolis without a helmet.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. Any of it.