I am a teacher and studio artist (in equal parts) living in Iowa City where I work in my studio and teach at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. Before coming to Iowa, I grew up outside Washington, DC; went to Vassar College in New York where I studied history and music; moved to Boston in the 1980s, worked for a tiny independent record company, tended bar, went to school for graphic design and art education; and then, finally, found Penland School of Crafts in Penland, NC. Disparate experience and different environments. 

At Penland I was exposed to ways of life and a way of making that felt absolutely right. It was there that I learned about craft and why it matters, how craft thinking includes ways of thinking about how we lead our lives and about what mark we make on the ground we inhabit. It was there that I learned to be a teacher and a maker in equal parts. 

Iowa City is a lovely place to be for a person who cares about art and cares about books and cares about the instances in which art and books and craft meet. I have learned from a host of esteemed bookmakers in my time here—about how books are made, were made, and what they can be. 

At some level, at the heart of all my work is paying attention to place, to understanding place (home) as somewhere to perch, how land and place imbed themselves indelibly. And so there is also Martha’s Vineyard, the one place I have spent time from childhood on. There, the people, family, the water and sand, the cliffs, rocks and boulders, and the trees are in my bones and in everything I make.

A few of the host of people from whom I have learned about books and making books, about art making and teaching include Pamela Spitzmueller, Gary Frost, Lawrence Yerkes, Giselle Simon, Shanna Leino, Karen Carcia, Sara Sauers, Sara Langworthy, Christina Shmigel, and Paulus Berensohn. Wouldn’t be here doing this without all of you.