Born in New York City, raised in Hollywood, and based in Amsterdam since 1987, I started writing when I was 8 years old when my father Sid gave me his Underwood typewriter and I haven’t stopped since. My mother Adele, a Hollywood glamour photographer (at the time), gave me my first camera when I was five and basically told me to go forth and shoot, advising, “It’s not the equipment, it’s the eye.” When I was 14, Adele would sneak me into the sophisticated jazz clubs on the Sunset Strip, the Mocambo, Crescendo and Interlude, jumpstarting my passion for jazz. I started out as a freelance journalist in the mid-1970s, after completing my studies at San Diego State University. I specialized in making interviews and taking photographs for a number of top newspapers and magazines with interesting and infamous icons like Henry Miller, Joan Baez, Muhammad Ali, Leonard Cohen, Jane Fonda, Charles Bukowski, Spielberg, Scorsese, and many others. I was the first female disc jockey at San Diego’s #1 rock station KPRI and jazz station KSDS, and hosted two syndicated talk shows (Culture Shock and Off the Record) on KWST, a progressive rock station in Hollywood. I am the author of three poetry chapbooks: Twelve Poems, Domestic Landscapes and Other Terrain, and Wounds of Change, as well as an award-winning children’s book author (Elusive Moose, Hidden Hippo; Barefoot Books), and a respected jazz and pop lyricist. I recently completed a memoir, One Way Ticket: On My Way to Here, and am working on a new project about Henry Miller. I have exhibited my portraits in galleries and museums in Los Angeles, London, Helsinki, and Amsterdam. When I am not writing or taking pictures, I practice yoga, pilates, and the art of silence.