I was born in Philadelphia, PA in an area known at the Greater Northeast. I spent my teens in South Jersey, where, as this was a time before cable, I grew up washed over by Philly’s TV and radio waves. I’ll never forget, as young person, driving up the New Jersey Turnpike on a Friday night and loosing the Philly stations and picking up the thump of New York radio broadcasting straight from the club. I knew then that I wanted to move to The City. I’ve traveled back and forth between these two cities for much of my adult life, but as the web blurred the line between analogue and digital, broadsheets and websites, I became firmly rooted in New York. Too this day I still read the Philadelphia Inquirer online as I used to in print. I never dreamed that I’d work there, as I did on completing my master’s as a Bollinger Fellow at Columbia’s J-school. I started school late, at 35. This was years after years of living la vie boheme at the Chelsea Hotel, where I paid $200 a month plus fresh flowers for the lobby, but that’s a story for another day. Back then, my mentor at the time was the great Gene Moore, the window designer extraordinaire at Tiffany’s. For several years I worked as a set designer and stylist with my work appearing in the pages of Architectural Digest, the windows of Harvey Nichols in London, and at Armani in New York. He was followed by thoughtful English and photography professors at Lehman College in the Bronx. Education followed, as did feature writing for the The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Wall Street Journal, The Architect's Newspaper, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. But at school I became infatuated with academia and left the press core to spend ten years at the Jesuit-run Fordham University, where I absorbed an ethos of cura personalis, eduction of the whole person. Today, I’m managing editor of Barnard Magazine, the alumnae magazine of Barnard College at Columbia University—eschewing the patriarchy for the matriarchy. It’s been a meandering path, one that I expect will diverge again and again, which suits me just fine.