I’ve spent most of my adult life involved with one social issue or another. In the ‘70’s with cooperation from the State Bureau of Children’s Services and private adoption agencies, I supervised a statewide effort to recruit homes for minority children, disabled children, and sibling groups. 

It didn’t feel right to ask others to do what I was not prepared to do. With one biological son already, my husband and I adopted three more children to complete our family. I worked to change adoption laws to make it easier to adopt and served on the newly-created Child Placement Review Board, which forced the State to keep track of foster children in its care.

In the mid-70’s, I served on the Mercer County Mental Health Board, and as a consultant to the State Division of Mental Health and Hospitals where I completed a comprehensive study of available rental housing throughout New Jersey for mental patients being discharged from institutions and returned to the community. What we knew before we started and was borne out by the study: there wasn’t enough decent housing anywhere in New Jersey for disadvantaged people.

As a single parent in the ‘80’s, I became involved with the New Jersey Foster Parents Association (now Foster and Adoptive Family Services) as a Board Member, State licensed foster parent, and President of the Mercer County Foster Parent Association. We were looking for safe, reliable homes for foster children, but, in large part, as the children coming into care had more serious problems because of increasing poverty and prevalence of drugs, the system failed to provide the needed services. I took in about two dozen children, some for a few days or a few months, one teenager for years. It was hard work.

From the mid-‘80’s until 2004 when I retired, I worked for the State of New Jersey, first for the Division of Youth and Family Services as an intake worker, responding to complaints of child abuse and neglect. It was a journey into a world impossible to imagine. I transferred to the Department of Community Affairs, Section 8 Rental Assistance Program, which provides subsidies to homeless families. I turned down promotions so I could continue working directly with tenants and landlords. I knew the inner city streets, garden complexes, and rural outposts over four counties. Everywhere I found people with unique voices struggling to get by. I knew how the system worked and how to get people what they wanted or needed.

I began writing poetry in the mid-‘90’s, as a way to record some of the more compelling stories I’d heard every day. My poetry has appeared in such journals as Journal of New Jersey Poets, US1 Worksheets, Out of Line, Slant, Exit 13, Witness, Rattapallax, The Ledge, Slipstream, Lullwater Review, Bucks County Writer, Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Struggle, Kelsey Review, Flint Hills Review, and online at Cultural Logic.

In 2001 I was granted a residency at Ragdale. My poems have won awards at the New Jersey Writers’ Conference, Why I Never Want to be a Trenton Landlord was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Slant recently dedicated its 21st volume to me.

I am the current Managing Editor of US1 Worksheets, the journal of the US1 Poets’ Cooperative. This critique group has met weekly for more than 35 years. Recently, I taught courses in the History of Furniture and Decorative Accessories at Mercer County Community College and How to Get Your Poetry Into Print at the Princeton YWCA.