A Little About Me…

I am a writer and musician living in New York, where I serve on the faculty of The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church.

I spent the first fifteen years of my adult life as a professional harpist, and although I was classically trained, I found my joy in writing and playing my own music with my harp/bass/drums band, Harp 46. The band, well, dis-banded in 2015, but I still get occasional emails from folks who see my name pop up on their Sirius/XM stations, which feels really good. In 2020, I went back into the studio for the first time in a decade to record a Christmas album. My most recent musical contribution to the world was a playing the introduction to Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” and posting it on social media.

After I got my Ph.D. in Religious Studies in 2014, I got to work publishing books that would help me get a tenure-track job - probably not the books that led you to my website given their very academic (inaccessible) tone!. But In 2020, I finally took a leap I had been wanting to take since I was a kid, and published a book that was creatively satisfying, called White Knuckle Love: A Memoir of Holding. It is a book that draws on not only the year I trained as a hospital chaplain in Manhattan, but also traces my journey of coming out as a lesbian at various points in my life, my struggle to “land” after a job gone wrong and a painful divorce, and learning how to become someone new.

I believe that we are all continually being invited to become someone new: someone more real, more brave, more imaginative, and more playful - which is really the bottom line of not only that book but all of my work in the world.

Bio for promotional use: click here

Formal CV: click here.