Past Events

I was raised in a book-rich, working-class home in Chicago. My parents were first generation Americans who put a premium on education because they both had to quit school to support their large, impoverished families.

Starting in second grade, in Sister Rita Margaret’s class -- where I learned the magic of diagramming sentences -- I was fascinated by what I could make words do. When Sister praised me for my writing, I figured I was onto something. This was the same nun who told me to just mouth the words in choir instead of singing because I had such a terrible voice!

When I was 10, I told my father I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. We both loved newspapers – Chicago was a great newspaper city back then, supporting several lively and competitive dailies. We used to have this ritual where we would read the papers together when dad came home from work so he wasn’t entirely surprised.

Still, I think he thought I would outgrow the idea and go into a more ... respectable career. Yet, I stuck with journalism through undergraduate school at Southern Illinois University and graduate school at the University of Illinois.

In my more than two decades in the business, I wrote for newspapers or wire services in Florida, Washington, DC, Chicago, and Southern California, including the Riverside Press Enterprise, The Daily News in Woodland Hills, and the Orange County Register. I loved being a reporter, chronicling people’s lives and witnessing history. I covered every beat imaginable, from feature writing to investigative reporting.

My crazy, wonderful newspaper career turned out to be great training for my latter incarnation as a screenwriter. For example, I never have faced writer’s block. That’s because I had to meet countless deadlines as a reporter, never with the luxury of not producing a story.

I developed impeccable listening skills along the way, which gave me a good ear for dialogue. As a reporter, I became an accomplished researcher and found I loved that aspect of storytelling, another skill that I found transferred well into screenwriting. In addition to my journalism background, I have nearly two decades of experience in public relations, as the spokeswoman for a large public agency, the Anaheim Union High School District – where I met the wonderful Pat Savage, who so graciously invited me here tonight!

Because I believed in the mission of public education, I found my work to be purposeful. I handled internal and external communication, including writing speeches and other material for the superintendent, holding press conferences, defusing community concerns, and engaging in crisis communication. A lot of crisis communication! I still wrote every day and picked up some new skills, like public speaking.