Bio

Although I was born in Missoula, Montana, I grew up in Southern California in the 1960’s which meant that beaches and water were a constant part of my life. I was not yet a teenager when I first took the helm of a boat, a rented Lido 14, on the waters of Newport Harbor. I was hooked. Whether it was sneaking down to take out my dad’s little 22-foot sloop alone or crewing on a Baltic Trader sailing up the Mexican coast, from the moment of that first sail, boats have always been a part of my life.

I spent a year in France as a foreign exchange student right after high school, and it was there I became addicted to travel and adventure. I attended seven different schools from California to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico before finally getting my first college degree. Early on I wrote and published magazine stories about my adventures including riding a bicycle 1,000 miles down the newly opened Baja California highway and crewing on a 44-foot sailboat throughout the islands of the South Pacific to New Zealand and back with the man I later married, Jim Kling.

We lived aboard the boat on the Intracoastal Waterway and on canals off the New River, and I soon got to know Fort Lauderdale from the water better than I knew the city streets. I enrolled at Florida International University and was accepted into their MFA in Creative Writing Program.

After completing my MFA in 1993, we took off sailing once again and spent two years cruising the waters of the Caribbean while I home schooled my son, Tim. It was during this voyage that I started my first novel, SURFACE TENSION. Within two years of our return, Jim and I divorced. Finding myself a single mom in tough financial straits, I went back to work as a teacher, and writing nights and weekends, I finally finished SURFACE TENSION, found an agent and my first novel was published in 2002, just in time to help pay for my son’s college tuition.