Contact me to purchase Joliet Girl, Rain, Lilies, Luck, Joliet in My Blood or Prodigal. Each book is $10.00 plus packaging and postage.

Joliet Girl (North Star Press of St. Cloud, 2010) is a poet's memoir about growing up in Joliet, Illinois, an aging steel town, in the late sixties and early seventies.  My memoir deals frankly with difficult subjects such as my sexual anxieties as an adolescent and a sister's mental illness.  It also explores how six sisters who were once close lose that special bond as they grow older.

Rain, Lilies, Luck (North Star Press of St. Cloud, 2010) is the fruit of over twelve years of working hard at the craft of poetry.  Most of the poems in my first full-length collection are grounded in personal experience, blending lyric with narrative, but figures such as Gauguin, Rumi and Walt Whitman make appearances as well. 

Read a review of this collection by Joseph Benevento, awarded author and poetry editor of Green Hills Literary Lantern: http://ghll.truman.edu/ghll22/GHLL%20XXII%20nonfiction/Benevento%20reviews%202011.html

Joliet in My Blood is a collection of related essays that explores how an aging industrial town shaped me as a person and a poet. Flawed beauty, relationships, class differences, race – all find their way into various pieces.

Prodigal (Pinyon Publishing, 2012) contains many poems about animals and nature. I do not shy away from the cruelty humans can inflict on both, but I try hard to balance sorrow and outrage with deep joy and delight.

http://www.pinyon-publishing.com/prodigal.html