A recipient of a 2007 poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, she has also recently won a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals including 5 AM, Cave Wall, Copper Nickel, Slipstream, and River Styx. She is the author of two chapbooks, Stealing Dust and Wearing Heels inthe Rust Belt, winner of the 2011 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. Before she was a poet and professor, she worked a variety of jobs including brief stints as a third shift factory worker, a waitress, a reporter for a small rural newspaper, and a bookseller for a chain bookstore that no longer exists. Currently, she lives in Warren, Pennsylvania and blogs at The Scrapper Poet.