My interest in aquatic environments is personal as well as professional. I’m from the Seattle area: a watery corner of the US where the land fractures into islands and peninsulas. My parents first met at a salmon cannery on Alaska’s Kodiak Island. My childhood was punctuated with clam-digging, fishing, and visits to Washington state’s rugged, rocky beaches. The delicate balance between the sea as beloved resource provider and potentially-exploited environment was an unspoken part of my upbringing. Now, through environmental writing, I aim to speak the unspoken.

I hold degrees from The Evergreen State College (BA, hippie school with no majors); Saint Joseph’s University (MA, Writing Studies); and the University of New Orleans (MFA, Creative Nonfiction). I’ve been writing for a long time, but it wasn’t until 2022, near the end of my MFA program, that I chose environmental writing as my path and passion.

My writing focuses on aquatic ecosystems, particularly the deep sea and the possible impacts of deep sea mining. As a journalist, I cover these environments and the issues that affect them. As an essayist, I use personal, cultural, and ecological threads to unveil humanity’s relationship to bodies of water and the creatures within them. And as a speculative fiction author, I explore the possible futures of today’s real-world choices for the planet’s water.

In all genres, my work blends research and storytelling to explore our connections to underwater worlds. With professional and creative writing, I draw attention to the importance of aquatic environments, and inspire society to protect these unique ecosystems from exploitation.

Water ecosystems are often neglected in environmental discussions. The fishy world below the surface is slippery, abstract, unseen. Yet the human relationship with the aquatic is ancient—as old as life on Earth itself, when our earliest ancestor evolved deep under the sea. For millennia, our hunter-gatherer predecessors traced rivers and coastlines. We’ve come so far from these origins. Through my writing, I seek to link human hearts back to these often-forgotten worlds underwater.