My passion is discovering the invisible that is right in front of us. I know I’ve done my job when everyone sitting at the table feels empowered and “fluent with data.” My measurement frameworks and analytics problem-solving techniques are designed to benefit marketers and creatives, which is why they scale well.

In school, I studied poetry, comparative literature, and long-form documentary narrative writing. My first job after college was in Provincetown, Massachusetts, working to transcribe recorded conversations between United States Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz and his assistant, Genine Lentine. This text went on to become Stanley’s final published work, “The Wild Braid,” which ultimately won the PEN/Winship Award for Poetry. Stanley Kunitz was my first mentor and kindred spirit.

After that charmed summer in Provincetown, I moved to Western Massachusetts, where I built a freelance career working for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, the Springfield Republican, and Holyoke Community College. I had two regular columns–one about building materials & home design, and one about interviewing professional artists and performers. I also volunteered for Perugia Press, where I remain on the Advisory Board.

My early career in writing and teaching was thrilling, but the lack of a steady paycheck was not. If my students didn’t show for an appointment, or the newspaper editors went in a different direction that month, I wouldn’t get paid. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I needed a “9-5”. I worked my connections, and before long I was a junior-level cubicle-dweller in the content strategy department for Advance Digital.

My early days were spent developing digital taxonomies & first-party data strategy for measuring online news content in Visual Sciences, the precursor for Adobe. It was supposedly the lower-level work, but as I came up with metrics descriptors that would become our reporting backbone, I realized that data strategy was an important seat of power. I understood that how we choose to label and codify activity is the the heartbeat of measurement, and, as the saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

At Advance, our ultimate goal was to study how people consumed online news, and use those findings to build easy-to-find, easy-to-use news content domains for readership in local newspaper markets across the United States. It was a large-scale test-and-learn scenario which gave birth to the way news works and is monetized today.

Having participated in one of the industry’s largest transformations since syndicated news, I left the Journalism world for good, and joined Publicis Health in NYC, working for Saatchi Wellness. I did this for two major reasons: The first, because Marketing and Advertising was and is a world where women represent at least 50% of leadership roles, and the second, because of the nimble, problem-solving nature of agencies today. These days, I work with smartest team in the business at SSW Analytics. Working with and for people I genuinely like, doing things that matter, and with creativity at the center, I’ve been able to develop my leadership skills and build a business model based on my two passions: Language and Data.

Through it all, I have never forgotten the moment, as a young writer, I discovered data. Sitting there before the Visual Sciences interface, watching the news being consumed in real-time as numbers flickered across the screen, I knew I’d found my magic. And these days, I’m all about helping my clients, my team, and everyone around me find *their* magic with data.