Born and raised among the mountains of Virginia, I listened to the oral traditions of storytellers as a child, and now try to incorporate that straight forward, easy to read style into my work. I began writing rhyming verse as a teenager and later worked a story format into that form of poetry. Eventually, I abandoned the rhymes for first person storytelling, and wrote my first short story at 16. thirty years later I got my first taste of publishing, when some poems were selected for a web sold anthology to benefit domestic violence awareness, and later other poems were picked up and publis more...