On Saturday, January 4, 2020, I started the new year and new decade on a wonderful note when I was notified by letter that I am the winner of the 2020 Poetry Is Life Book Award. My first volume of poetry, "If There's No Heaven," is scheduled to be pubished in May of 2020 by Poetry Is Life Publishing. This is particularly appropriate, because the poems in the book are largely autobiographical in nature and chronicle the first two years of my life as a woman after repressing my true gender identity for over sixty years. It was largely written contemporaneously as I was living the life described in these poems.
