Chelsea lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, Paul, their three kids, a very large dog, and a rather little cat. She has a Bachelor’s degree in English and a Master’s in Educational Leadership with a concentration in Higher Education Administration. She has worked in a freelance capacity at Lafayette College and currently serves as the Research Fellow for the APAP funded project Tapestries: Voices Within Contemporary Muslim Cultures.

Chelsea has had a life-long love of the written word. She consumed books like fuel as a child and wrote stories, mostly about dragons, at her dining room table. Her first publication came as part of the Young Authors group in Fraser, MI. It was a diamanté of cats and dogs, minus one crucial line. Chelsea would like to take this opportunity to let anyone who has happened upon this unfortunate poem know that she does indeed know how to write a proper diamanté and the absence of line 5, in which cats would be described in verb form, was an editorial error.

Following the Great Diamanté Debacle of ’84, Chelsea retired her pencil, though she continued to read at a super-human rate. This pace slowed a bit when she reached middle school because…complex adolescent social structures.

In recent years, Chelsea has used poetry to try to make sense of those issues that create a rift between the natural and civilized worlds – how humanity limits empathy, how expediency impedes humanity, how fear begets expediency, how the simple act of not-knowing breeds so much fear – and how tensions between race, gender, and social class amplify this rift. Chelsea has also explored these themes from an academic viewpoint. She views the college experience in purely opportunistic terms. That is, the opportunity to open students up to the social inequities that plague our society, and to guide their experiences toward a deeper understanding of what it means to be a good human. Also, to be kind to animals. Good humans are kind to animals.