Her childhood experiences in Atlantic
City, N.J. have played a large role in much of her writing. The
landscape and tenor of the deteriorating resort in the 1950s and
1960s, before gambling was legalized, form the backdrop for her
first novel, Bobby's
Girl, as well as the poems in Sea Air
in a Grave Ground Hog Turns Toward. The sea and beach have served
as inspiration for other
poetry books, including Pirate’s
Song, and Combing the Waves. To date, she's published
over 17 poetry books, chapbooks, and e-books, most recently Balancing Acts from Marsh
Hawk Press and Beggars at the Wall from Ikon.
Increasingly throughout the 1970s,
she experimented with serial forms in poetry, finding it more and
more difficult to see individual poems as units complete in themselves.
Finally it became evident that only the larger format provided by
an extended prose narrative could embody all the issues she hoped
her writing would explore. Since 2001, she's been focussed mainly on prose poems, often based on news stories, which provide a natural if somewhat cockeyed link between poetry and fiction.
Her play, Kité Fami:
My family has left me, based on the Salem witch trials, was
produced at The Studio For Creative Movement in New York City, March
1976, directed by Merle Lister. "Tellings," a dramatic monologue
based on poems written about her mother’s life, was performed
at Theatre St. Clements in 1979.
During 1989-1990 she served as
ghostwriter for three psychiatry books published by The PIA Press,
on Manic Depression, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Co-Dependency.
Working on these books, concerned with the problems which survivors
of psychological and/or sexual abuse face when they enter into adult
love relationships, offered new insights into the characters available
to her fiction. Her second novel, The
Lion's Share, is the story of a woman
who, having been sexually molested as a ten-year-old, becomes involved
in her first healthy relationship with a man at the age of thirty-four.
Novels currently in progress examine other aspects of problematic
personalities. And, in terms of what some would consider "problematic"
personalities, a large thrust of her work over the past decade has
been researching and editing the anthology Bearing
Life: Women’s Writing on Childlessness.
Over the years her ouvre has expanded
to include short stories, memoirs, articles, criticism, visual work,
and editing, while poetry remains a firm, and continual, base.
Additional biographical information
can be found in Marquis Who’s Who in America, a forthcoming
edition of Marquis Who’s Who of American Women, Gale
Research’s Contemporary
Authors, Artists
Without Frontiers,
Bowker
Bios, and various volumes published by
the International Biographical Center.
Full
Curriculum Vitae
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