My Book Is Here!

It's my particular story, but hopefully a broadly accessible one

After decades of writing and publishing individual poems about the people who made me — and almost didn’t — my book, The Enchantress Queen and The Ghost Who Made Me, is finally out in the world.

The book is published by Livingston Press and won the 2025 Changing Light Novel-in-Verse Prize. It tells the story of a girl caught between two opposing forces: her mother, a magnetic but unpredictable enchantress, and her father, a ghost who disappeared when she was young and didn’t reappear until she was an adult. It’s a story about divorce, poverty, the disco era, mental illness, and the strange grace of imperfect love — told in poems because only poems could get at what I needed to say.

I came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, swept up in the tidal wave of divorces in the U.S. at that time. While the particulars of your own story may not match mine precisely, we all create myths about the people who make us, and they become larger than life. Whatever your story, I hope you will see parts of yourself in mine.

Many of the individual poems have appeared over the years in journals including Pleiades, december, Club Plum, On the Seawall, Burningword, and others. But the book is something different from the sum of its parts — an interconnected sequence with its own narrative arc and momentum. It works as a great companion to the autobiographical non-fiction essay I wrote for Tupelo Quarterly last year called, “Not That Walden.”

If you’d like to order a copy, it’s available through Amazon or Livingston Press.

I’d love to hear what you think after reading it.