“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”
Robert Frost

Poetry has always been an important part of my life. I still have poems I wrote in elementary school, and I have MANY from junior high and high school. Some of those I compiled in a book of poetry for the Contra Costa County Young Author’s Project Competition when I was a senior in high school, and my book won first prize - that was an exciting moment for me! I found out I had won when the presenter began reading my poem, “Outer Shells,” which is one I have sometimes read to my students through the years. As my prize, thirty copies of my book were published, and one was put in each school library. I still remember how thrilled I felt when someone told me they had checked out my book from the library.

Some years back, as “practice” for the ebooks I was having my English 9 Honors create, I created my own poetry ebook titled Time Capsule: My Teenage Self (you can read more about this book, as well as my class poetry ebooks, in the book section). I never did anything to promote my book and just basically let it sit there on the Smashwords website - but somehow, it “crept out,” and I started seeing it posted in other places as well. One of my students told me last year he had seen a bunch of my poetry on the computer. A lot of the poems had been printed earlier in Antioch’s Daily Ledger, back when they had a poetry section. For years, in fact, my mom had one of my poems that she had cut out from the newspaper hanging on her refrigerator door.

I always thought my first “official book” would be a book of poetry. Having my first book be a book about the Civil War in Missouri was certainly not something I could have imagined before that box of family letters basically fell into my lap. I still hope to see more of my recent poetry in print. Since I’ve written many poems about state and national parks, as well as taken many related photos, I’m hoping to publish a book titled Park Love in the future. In the meantime, I will share here some of my poems that been published in anthologies, newspapers, magazines, and online (apparently in random places!) over the years. To see others, check out my Facebook Page: Poetry to Inspire.