A bit about me:
As a child of federal bureaucrats, I moved around the West and had the privilege of growing up mostly in Santa Fe, New Mexico and rural eastern Oregon. My intellectual pursuits have always been grounded in a deep sense of place and curiosity about sameness and and difference. As an undergraduate I attended Willamette University, a small liberal arts college in the heart of the rainy Northwest. There I met friends for life and mentors who continue to inspire me. I left the country for the first time in 1997 when I studied abroad in Ecuador and have been inexplicably enamored with all things Latin American ever since. On the eve of the millennium, I moved to the Rio Grande Valley of deep south Texas for a true borderlands experience living in almost-Mexico and not-quite the U.S. From there, Eric and I repeatedly drove into and across Mexico camping, climbing, and learning. After an adventurous three years of teaching middle school science and social studies, my mind yearned for deeper intellectual stimulation. We relocated to the lush Sonoran desert of Tucson, Arizona for graduate school and soon spent a year living in DF (Mexico City) pretending to be chilangos. Because all things in nature are cyclical, we returned to Eric's natal state of North Carolina for half a decade before finally settling into the bounty of the Treasure Valley.
As a child of federal bureaucrats, I moved around the West and had the privilege of growing up mostly in Santa Fe, New Mexico and rural eastern Oregon. My intellectual pursuits have always been grounded in a deep sense of place and curiosity about sameness and and difference. As an undergraduate I attended Willamette University, a small liberal arts college in the heart of the rainy Northwest. There I met friends for life and mentors who continue to inspire me. I left the country for the first time in 1997 when I studied abroad in Ecuador and have been inexplicably enamored with all things Latin American ever since. On the eve of the millennium, I moved to the Rio Grande Valley of deep south Texas for a true borderlands experience living in almost-Mexico and not-quite the U.S. From there, Eric and I repeatedly drove into and across Mexico camping, climbing, and learning. After an adventurous three years of teaching middle school science and social studies, my mind yearned for deeper intellectual stimulation. We relocated to the lush Sonoran desert of Tucson, Arizona for graduate school and soon spent a year living in DF (Mexico City) pretending to be chilangos. Because all things in nature are cyclical, we returned to Eric's natal state of North Carolina for half a decade before finally settling into the bounty of the Treasure Valley.