I grew up without a TV in rural Colorado. I inherited a love of books from my outlaw father and went on to earn a PhD in literature at Rutgers University. After teaching at the Bard High School Early College for more than a decade I’m now earning a master’s degree at the Craig Newmark J-school. In my first semester I wrote stories about the Christmas tree market in New York City, how two artists are reinventing the meaning of trash and why Caribbean merchants are struggling in a new development. I also created a video feature about a cobbler in Brooklyn, a data visualization of racial disparities in infant mortality rates. I'm studying both Business and Economy and Arts and Culture and am particularly interested in the overlap of these two fields.