Professional Background
Like you, my professional integrity was built through many influential career experiences. Together, they’ve developed in me a unique skillset for combining high-quality content with well-executed strategy.
In reading this page, you’ll learn about my professional story, and perhaps recognize some character traits that we have in common.
My years spent in print news were some of the most defining of my career.
Trained by Time magazine, I began my career as a magazine and newspaper journalist, working my way up from beat reporting to the managing editor’s role. When my children were born, I left the newsroom for a busy freelance clientele, editing for publications, academia, marketing, and non-profits. Even now, I continue to edit content for select clients spanning diverse fields, and I’m a member of the Editorial Freelancers Association and ACES: The Society for Editing.
Through my early years in journalism, I developed skills that I used in every phase of my career that followed, including:
The ability to build purpose-driven, sustainable relationships
An understanding of which questions to ask, how to ask them, and how to anticipate their answers
An ear for the right angle in any story
An appreciation for deadlines and processes
Strong team and project management skills
Excellent writing and editing skills
Appreciating my technical and narrative recommendations, my editing clients began asking for assistance designing and developing marketing content and public relations plans. The work organically shifted from writing and editing into helping scientists, physicians, general contractors, Realtors, non-profits, schools, breweries, and a hospital system create and execute messaging strategies, including high-level correspondences, marketing campaigns, grant development, fundraising, speeches, translational storytelling, and public relations projects. This work has remained a key part of my career, and has taught me to be:
Adaptable to diverse fields and needs
Comfortable learning company jargon, values, & processes
Calm under pressure
Able to represent and mingle within varied groups
After earning prizes and a fellowship for my short fiction, I discovered that I had a good eye for developmental manuscript editing. A novel I’d edited sparked the interest of a producer, who asked for feedback on a similarly themed screenplay.
Over the next three years, this connection would lead me to become head writer and co-creator for a dramatic television series for HBO, travel the country doing research, and constantly commute between Manhattan and West Michigan. When the show moved into preproduction, I sought a more family-friendly lifestyle, and turned to a field that had always interested me: academia.
As the television series moved into preproduction, I was invited to become a faculty member at a small, private film college, called Compass College of Cinematic Arts. The sole professor of English and creative writing, I worked intensely in curriculum development while teaching a full load of courses each term. I sat on four committees, established and directed three student development groups, advised and mentored individual students, and voluntarily performed editorial tasks for the offices of the Director of Education, the Dean of Education, Admissions, and the President.
My students have gone on to earn awards and honors in writing, including for screenplays at the Austin Film Festival, and fellowships at the Warner Bros. Writers’ Workshop and the Athena Film Festival.
To immerse my students in the gothic genre, I held our lectures on the topic in the oldest building in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan — St. Mark’s Episcopal Church.
Where my clients are covered.
More and more I found myself looking for opportunities to design communication strategies and perform organizational problem-solving functions at work. I realized that I missed the pace and challenge of planning, developing, and managing messaging, so with an evergreen fondness for higher education, I moved back into the world of independent consulting.
My clients—some of them academics themselves—tend to hire me in part because of the diversity of my professional work, finding value in the adaptable, resourceful, and composed approach that I’ve developed throughout my career.
In case you’re wondering…
My Bachelor of Arts degree is in English,
with minors in communications and French,
from Michigan State University.
I also hold a terminal Master of Fine Arts degree
in Creative Writing from Bennington College.
