My Story.
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background + education
I grew up in Oxnard, California — a coastal town where both sides of my family had deep roots. My Catholic schools were built around service, stewardship, and social justice. That early formation wired me to use whatever I'm good at for something bigger than myself.
At UC Berkeley, I majored in English. I loved the classroom — the buzz of debate, the precision of a well-placed argument — so much that I decided to become a teacher. Just to keep the conversation going.
career beginnings
I taught high school English in the Bay Area, where I learned that the best writing isn't about showing off vocabulary — it's about making someone care.
In 2008, my husband and I moved to Las Vegas and I answered a Craigslist ad for a company called Zappos. What started as data entry became content operations at scale: I built and managed a 20-person catalog team — hiring half of them myself — responsible for the data integrity of every product on the site, down to the UPC. I ran the ticket queue that fed every buyer's purchase orders, coordinated quality control with a team in China, and eventually became the product analyst who made our catalog transfer cleanly to Amazon. Same lesson across every role: when the infrastructure is right, the content works. When it isn't, nothing does.
now
In 2016, I left to raise my daughter — the same kid who, at age four, invented the name TREATSALAD. While I was home, I expanded into nutrition education, fitness, and Italian. (My husband and daughter are dual U.S.–Italian citizens. Someone has to keep up at Sunday dinner.)
She's heading to college now, and I'm returning to the thing I've done since childhood — writing. Essays and memoir, posted here and delivered through my newsletter: dispatches from the gray area of midlife, where almost nothing is only one thing.
