Bio

Lassoing lobsters in the Caribbean Sea. Setting the Guinness World Record for the most vertical feet skied uphill by a female in 24 hours. Climbing mountains in the middle of Rio de Janeiro. An 8,000-square foot contemporary house built around a collection of modern art. The Cow Chip Tossing World Championships. A double mastectomy. Olympic gold medalist Summer Sanders. The top hikes in the Tetons. Lightweight hiking crampons. Spending Easter in Madrid. Wyoming’s purported pygmy demon. Learning to like beer.

These are random, but not. I’ve written about them all, along with hundreds of other subjects in my years as a freelance journalist and editor. 

My writing has won Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and Harold S. Hirsch Awards from the North American Snowsports Journalists Association. Most recently the Global Travel Media Alliance named me one of eight finalists for its 2020 Global Travel Writer of the Year honor (!). (But I didn’t win.) All of the stories included in the portfolio that made me a finalist first ran in The Washington Post. One of these was about a family trip to Bulgaria, where my dad was born: “My father left Bulgaria when he was 14. Nearly 7 decades later, we visit as a family.” The fact these stories ran in The Washington Post made them all the more special to me. From ages 12 to 17, I—with serious help from my mom—delivered The Post seven days a week to 100+ houses in my neighborhood. The first time I flew on a plane (age 16) was after winning the paper’s Carrier of the Year contest. The prize? An all-expense paid trip to France. It was on that trip that I fell in love with travel.

Like most people who live in Jackson Hole—FYI, “Jackson Hole” refers to the entire valley; “Jackson” is the biggest town in the valley—I didn’t plan on settling here. Neither did I think I’d be a writer. I graduated from Northwestern University with degrees in Math and Economics. Immediately after graduation I moved to Jackson where the plan was to spend a year learning how to ski before starting law school. If I met Harrison Ford, who lived here at the time, all the better. The law school part of that plan was thrown out the window within two weeks of my arrival in Jackson. The learning how to ski part remains a work in progress, but I’ve definitely gotten good enough I lived through a ski mountaineering camp I wrote about in “Even Experts Can Get Better.”

In 2015 and early 2016, I might have been be the only journalist in the country concurrently writing columns about outdoor adventure and cancer. Both appeared in the Jackson Hole News&Guide, Jackson’s weekly paper that has won the National Newspaper Association’s Award for General Excellence numerous times. I’ve been writing the paper’s Excursion column since 2011. I started writing the C Word after being diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer in December 2014. 

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