Bachelor of Arts, Creative Writing, SFSU, 1989. Major influences include Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, William Shakespeare, W.S. Merwin, and Sylvia Plath (to name a very few!). I was raised by writers and took up writing at a very young age, winning grand prize in a massive national essay contest (made available to 85,000 schools) when I was twelve, and publishing my first poems in literary magazines when I was seventeen. I learned early that a well-written piece was about the surest way to get my parents to look up from their typewriters and remember I was there.