Hello! Welcome to my website. Feel welcome, also, to download the entire texts of my unpublished books posted here. As many of you might know, I have nineteen PUBLISHED books – the latest two of which are “Crossing the Equal Sign” (Plain View Press, TX), poetry about the experience of mathematics, and “Chronic Progressive” (same press), the last in my “well spouse poetry trilogy” about my first husband’s 26 years with multiple sclerosis, and the effect on the entire family. Some other published books are “Surviving the Alphabet” (Huge Pathetic Force, PA – my first UNthemed poetry collection), “Dirty Details: The Days and Nights of a Well Spouse” (Temple University Press, PA), “Epsilon Country” (the second of the well spouse poetry trilogy (The Center for Thanatology Research, NY), and “An Ambitious Sort of Grief (my pregnancy loss journal, from The Liberal Press, TX). By way of further introduction, I am a mathematician as well as a writer, with a math Ph.D. from Connecticut Wesleyan. Currently I teach math part time at Arcadia University in Glenside PA; I’m particularly excited about a course which I developed – Truth and Beauty: Mathematics in Literature. I wrote an article, which I hope will be published soon, about that course and how it went the first time I taught it (how open and responsive the students were, how much we all learned). I also write reviews of math texts and other math books for The American Mathematical Monthly, MAA Online, and The Mathematical Intelligencer. About my “math poetry”, in “Crossing” and otherwise: Some of the images in the poems come from math concepts, but readers don’t have to understand the math in order to feel whatever the poem makes them feel. In fact, sometimes something is ADDED by nonunderstanding, or partial understanding. Non-mathematicians can and do experience math in positive and/or meaningful ways, and the poems have appeared in literary as well as math journals. At any rate, the poems are meant to be about passion for math, and for all truth. My writings about pregnancy loss and about spousal chronic illness/care giving are well known in certain circles. My third baby, a little girl named Kerin, died at the age of two days, just around the same time that Jeff, my first husband, was diagnosed with M.S. It seems that whenever anything happens to me, I write five or six books about it. The books have helped me, and I’m told that they’ve helped others in similar situations. In my non-writing and non-math life I love classical piano, singing (first soprano), Scrabble, thrift-shopping (Look for my posts on thethriftshopper.com.), my four grown living children, three gran’s, and Jon (second husband). A little about the history of this site, and what's on it: A few years ago I decided that I didn’t want to wait years to place my as-yet-unpublished books, but instead to “cyber-self-publish”. The books on this site are almost as numerous as my published books (and I enjoy writing “but not quite”…). “Oaktag and Eyeballs”, Parts I and II, is/are about home-schooling, my own and my family’s version of it. “Not Erma Bombeck” is about being a feminist mother of young children, active in the feminist movement of the 70’s, what that felt like. (“Mothers constitute an oppressed class, but that is not a reason for a woman not to choose to become a mother.”) “The Woman Mathematician” consists of a few miscellaneous “math poems” not included in “Crossing”. “Cruel and Unusual” is a collection of essays about the well spouse experience and what I believe society should do about it. “The Fuss and the Fury” is what I wrote during the baby- and toddler-hood of my youngest son Devin. (“Babies give me a feeling which I wish would last.”) “Closer to Dying: Poems from the 49th Year” is probably self-explanatory. “Permission to Add” is my collection, so far, of math-teaching limericks. (I’m proud that I’ve recently begun getting “Faculty Development Grants” for writing these limericks.) Finally, there are four poetry collections (even-changing, but these are the current versions…): “The Loneliness of the Short Distance Runner”, “The Three-Pointed Star”, “One Things about Angels”, and “The Life and Habits of the Childof- Misfortune”, which is about post-traumatic stress syndrome (not depression). I hope you’ll check out some or all of these. Currently I’m trying to place the sequel to “Dirty Details”, tentatively titled “Still the End”, after the chronic-ness of the situation and also after something that our then-8-yearold said. It’s harder to place memoirs than it was when “Dirty Details” was published by Temple U. Press, but this one I’m determined to NOT have to include on this site. I’ll give it a couple of years! If anybody has a lead, I’d love it if you’d let me know. (Briefly, it’s a memoir of spousal chronic illness after nursing home placement; it includes the logistics of complete paralysis and increasing dementia, society and the health care system’s denial of subtle dementia and the dire consequences for “the family”, my own “moving on” and eventually finding new love. There’s a lot of struggle in this book, and a lot of “attitude”. I imagine that, like “Dirty Details”, it’s pretty controversial, at least for some.) Again, let me know if you come across a publisher or agent that might be interested in this kind of thing. And once again, welcome to my site and I hope you get something out of it. I’d love to hear from you if you do!