The Author

About the Author

I was raised in a small town in Pennsylvania which, at the time I was growing up, was fairly rural and very lovely—much like the area of the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts where I now live part of the time with my husband.

After college, some of which was spent at the University of Iowa Writing Workshop where I studied poetry, I moved to New York City and began a career in publishing and advertising. In the late 1980s, I founded an advertising agency that specialized in book publishing accounts and watched it grow over the next decade and a half to be the most successful of its kind. About the same time I started the agency, my husband and I began to spend weekends in the Berkshires, renting for many years and then buying a small cottage not far from the Columbia County border. Like so many weekenders, we found ourselves drawn more and more to the serenity and natural beauty of the area—the corn fields, dairy farms, and rolling hills. When I was able to sell the agency several years ago to devote myself to writing, we also decided to spend more time in this part of the world.

Though I continued to write poetry for several years after moving to the city, I found it difficult—especially after my business career began to take off—to give it the deep concentration that I believe poetry demands. More for fun than anything else, I tried writing a romance, then a few mysteries and suspense novels, and I was lucky enough to find an agent who saw some potential in them and helped me get published. Though I learned a lot about plot and pacing from writing those books, I longed to write something that was more emotionally resonant and character-driven.

It took me a while to find the right story to tell. I’d long been struck by the differences between the small, close-knit rural communities in the Berkshires and the upscale urban weekenders who over the last couple of decades have bought up and developed land that had been owned by local families for many generations. The idea for Local Knowledge came from thinking about those differences and the tensions that naturally arise from them.

So Near, which takes place in a fictional town close to the one in Local Knowledge, explores different, deeper, and more devastating tensions: those between a young married couple who are faced with a terrible loss—a loss that threatens to destroy their marriage and everything they once believed in. While it deals with some serious issues, I believe that, in the end, So Near is a story of hope and redemption and the transformative power of love.

In addition to writing, I work on behalf of various non-profits in New York City and the Berkshires. I am the past chairperson of The Academy of American Poets and currently serve on its executive committee.