Welcome! I'm a writer and editor who reports on innovative people, interesting cultures, 
and faraway places.

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My articles have been published in several anthologies and magazines, including Afar, Islands, National Geographic Traveler, Garden Design, Sport Diver, and on nationalgeographic.com. I've worked as a contributing editor for Islands, an associate editor at Sport Diver, and a freelance editor at Via. I was also a senior editor at Afar, which launched in 2009. The magazine won the 2010 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award for the best travel magazine in the United States.

I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, where my wanderlust first sparked. I made detours on my way home after kindergarten, looking for the route with the maximum amount of violets growing by the sidewalk. I spent hours gazing at David Attenborough's book Life on Earth, amazed at a picture of a cliff in Peru covered with the rainbow feathers of macaws. Later, I read books by authors from other countries--Gabriel García Márquez, Nadine Gordimer, the Brontës--and was transported to Colombia, South Africa, and the drizzly moors of England. Nebraska has a strong sense of place, too. Willa Cather helped me to see that.

In 1995, I left home for college, first at the University of Kansas, and then at Stanford University. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in English, I hit the road with my husband-to-be, Michael Vance, whom I met at Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park. We worked at a restaurant just outside Denali National Park in Alaska, and then in Yellowstone. I saved money for a solo trip to southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. The routine was set: work, save money, travel, repeat. Since then I've been to about 70 countries and have learned to combine my passions for writing and exploring the world into a career. 

I've recently returned from a nine-month trip to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, which I wrote about on my Happy Travels Blog. Now I'm working part-time as a social media strategist at Wilderness Travel and writing part-time from our home in Oakland, California.