As much as I love writing fiction, my first love growing up was poetry. I’ve been writing, essentially, since I could speak in complete sentences. My first short story was written in second grade. I only started writing stories, because at heart I believed I was a storyteller. That’s what was missing in poetry for me: the depth of a story. After graduating from high school, I attended the University of Illinois at Chicago, achieving a B.A. in Creative Writing. I currently work full time as a caption editor for a company that manages the closed captioning for networks such as Fine Living, HGTV, ABC and DIY. Working in that profession has, of course, sharpened my craft in terms of editing and deadlines and proofreading. My influences are pretty lengthy: Dr. Seuss, J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Isaac Asimov, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and just about every children's book author alive and dead!