A silhouette is an apt image to describe my path as a writer. I have always been interested in stark contrasts, moments of change, turning points and epiphanies--those moments that reveal character, shape a life and profile a path. Truth--and history--fascinates me. I have been fortunate to have spent my entire career in creative non-fiction, depicting true stories that chronicle creativity - first, as an arts journalist, then historian, and now, biographer.

As a Boston Globe arts journalist for fourteen years, I spent one career profiling more than a thousand artists in all media, striving to sketch a portrait of how life meets work, observing the trail of creativity as it transforms idea into form.

My first book, award-winning Hidden History of New Hampshire (History Press, 2008, www.historypress.net), profiles sixty legacies created by pioneers who followed their bliss and left indelible marks on the history of the Granite State. The New Hampshire Center for the Book, a division of the New Hampshire State Library, www.nh.gov/nhsl/bookcenter/ chose this anthology as "Book of the Week."

                                                                                                                     Since then I have spent the better part of a decade exploring the art of biography--the ulitmate profile--by researching the life of Carleen Maley Hutchins (1911-2009), a most remarkable American female violinmaker whose biography I am currently writing. Two days after her death, The New York Times profiled Hutchins: www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/arts/music/09hutchins.html.

To follow the living legacy of Hutchins in the most remarkable professional ensemble in the world performing on two Hutchins Violin Octets, see The Hutchins Consort www.hutchinsconsort.org.