I started writing poetry in 2004, after almost 10 years devoted to watercolor painting. Since 2004, I have had six chapbooks published, including "Upheaval", which was one of three winners in the Red Ochre Press Chapbook Contest for 2012. I have also had the pleasure of placing in the Bay Area Poets Coalition contest (BAPC) four times in the last five years. Like my fellow poets, I have also had several hundred individual poems published online and in print. Since September, 2014, I have devoted myself to the Tanka form, and have recently had a tanka selected as Editor's Choice (Cattails, winter, 2015) and several tanka published in other specialized journals: Ars Poetica, Undertow, A Hundred Gourds, and Red Lights. I continue to read and study both modern and classical tanka, as well as read, with great pleasure, contemporary poetry.