In second grade, I won the “Good Job, Little Reader” classroom award, for reading 42 books in a month. My first book was published in 1982, in the art and publishing center down the hall from my second grade classroom (a group of volunteer moms who sewed together typset pages into a bookish creation). It was a rather morbid, ten page novel called E.T. Goes Bad and explored the possibility that E.T. had a dark side. My second book was a much lighter endeavor, a seven-pager entitled Smocks, Smocks, Smocks. In fifth grade, I decided to break out into some action-adventure fiction with my much-anticipated trilogy The M&M Family Adventures which was also published by the ladies down the hall. Mind you, the idea of talking M&M’s was not so common in 1986. If only I had copyrighted.

Skipping ahead a few years…
In 1996, as a sophomore in college, I won an AWP Intro Award for an essay entitled Life Explosion, which was subsequently published in the Blue Mesa Review.

In 2000 I won Touchstone Magazine’s National Graduate Nonfiction Contest with an essay called The Gibbledeschnarf, (which was published in both Touchstone and Thin Air Magazine). Touchstone also published a small essay of mine called Human Nature.

After grad school, I landed some freelance work with ESPN: The Magazine (Heavenly Bodies, July 2002), numerous race reports and tri related articles for Triathlete Magazine and Inside Triathlon, and a bit of celebrity chasing for UsWeekly.