About

Born and raised in New Orleans, I grew up surrounded by family, friends, food, music and the rich local culture of America’s most European city. After graduating from the Isidore Newman School, I left New Orleans for Memphis, where I attended Rhodes College. I spent my first two years at Rhodes following a Great Books curriculum (everyone did) and then settled in to studying French and Spanish in earnest, eventually receiving a BA in Foreign Languages. I spent a year after college working at office jobs and diligently avoiding being a high school Spanish teacher before discovering library science while visiting a friend at LSU. I fell completely in love with librarianship while finishing my MLIS in Baton Rouge and have been happily pursuing that career path ever since.

I’ve held jobs in both academic and medical libraries over the course of more than 30 years in the profession. No matter what the setting, my focus has always been on serving the public and teaching users to be effective information searchers. In particular, I love working with first year college students, designing and delivering programs to welcome them to the academic library research experience both within the context of the UTC community as well as in preparation for lifelong careers as perpetually curious learners. I am a firm believer in the librarian as integral partner in the educational process with critical thinking and evaluation being the cornerstone skills we as professionals are ideally positioned to teach.

I’ve got two daughters who are mostly grown now. Once they left the nest, I began taking on both foster and rescue dogs and cats, so at any given time I usually have at least 5 animals living under my roof. Outside of my family and pets, my loves include music, cooking, cars, reading, watching television and working on my historic 1931 Sears kit house in Old Town Signal Mountain. I try and manage a trip to the beach at least once a year to remain sane and my two favorite foods are shrimp and cheeseburgers.