Welcome to my website. I'm a writer and editor in the Washington, D.C., area with wide-ranging experience in journalism, science writing, public information and editorial project management.

I've worked on staff or as a contractor for National Geographic, The Washington Post, National Institutes of Health, American Association for the Advancement of Science and The Chronicle of Higher Education. For a decade I traveled to Southeast Asia on editorial assignments at several international research centers. Besides news and feature articles, my writing portfolio includes annual reports, press releases, newsletters, brochures, web text, essays and even legends for National Geographic maps.

My work has been published by National Geographic News, The Washington Post, Smithsonian.com, Washingtonian, Science News, The Indonesian Observer, Potomac Review, Humanities and many others. In early 2011 I helped launch the online Washington Independent Review of Books, for which I'm now a senior editor and contributing reviewer.

I have a B.A. in English from Marietta College in Ohio, an M.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri and an M.A. in writing/creative nonfiction from Johns Hopkins. I've received a Nate Haseltine Fellowship in Science Writing, a Rotary Foundation Fellowship to Cape Town, South Africa, and a residency at VCCA.

Today I do selective freelance work while working on a book about 19th-century travel writer Eliza Scidmore and her role in the origin of Washington's cherry trees.

All banner artwork on this site comes from traditional Indonesian batiks.