I started playing the piano when I was three years old. My family would go to church on Sundays, and when we came home, I'd climb onto the piano bench and play the melodies of the hymns we had sung that day. From that time on, playing by ear was something that came easily to me. I began taking piano lessons when I was eight years old, quickly amazing and frustrating my piano teacher at the same time. She desperately wanted me to read the notes, but once I learned how the songs sounded, my ear took over and my eyes took a vacation. My earliest composing began when I was reading lyrics in books and made up my own melodies to go along with them. When I was nine, I wrote a "Classically-styled" melody and harmonies to accompany the lyrics I was reading in one of my third-grade books, and I have been writing music ever since. Poetry writing has also been something that has always seemed to spill from my mind like an emotional rainstorm. Writing invigorates me and makes me feel alive; however, in my early teens performance anxiety became a personal battle for me, and over the years this has made it hard for me to share the one talent I truly love with others. In 1981 while in college studying music, my piano performance teacher helped me work through this barrier, and in 1984 I graduated with my Bachelor's Degree in Music Theory. I still wrestle a bit with performance anxiety, but I know we all have struggles to overcome as we seek to develop our abilities, and life's greatest outcomes are realized through perseverance and hard work. I believe I will always write and play music because these expressions are the way my deepest thoughts and emotions are manifest; it's what DNA created my mind to do. I hope to share my gifts with others through making CD's, through occasional personal performances, and through finding others who want to sing my songs. I also hope to publish collections of my poetry and books based on single poems in the near future.