I am an associate professor of journalism at the Gaylord College at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK. In addition, I run the Oklahoma Scholastic Media conference and contest, an organization that has been serving scholastic media students, teachers and publications since 1916. My research mainly focuses on scholastic journalism education.

I think of myself as a media writing specialist. I started my professional journalism experience in community newspapers, specifically general assignments reporting and design work. After transitioning into higher education, I continued writing as a freelancer for a variety of magazines including Luxiere Oklahoma, Oklahoma Living, 405 Business and Norman Magazine.

I have also written young adult books, The Ghost Glimpser series, available on Amazon, and more recently I have gotten into screen writing. I was honored with the Randal Greenland Screenwriter of the Year at the 2019 Austin Revolution Film Festival and won best short screen play at the deadCENTER film festival with the piece The Uterus Chat. Meeting great people at deadCENTER led my husband and I to co-write a stage play, Alcoholidays, which was produced by NextStage and premiered in November 2013 in Oklahoma City. Since then, Alcoholidays has had two additional runs, and I have had another play, Fathiest, premiere in Oklahoma City.

Currently at OU, I teach a variety of classes including multimedia journalism, introduction to media writing, feature writing and media law. During my eight years at NWOSU, 2005-2013, I taught classes such as news reporting, news editing, feature writing, media law and publication design as well as advised the student newspaper, the Northwestern News.

I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in professional writing from University of Oklahoma and a doctorate in educational leadership and administration from Oklahoma State University.