Paula is currently writing her family history/memoir, What Sparks Story or What is Left After the Declutter. She is on the third major draft, covering family from 1855 to 1996, with helpful comments from the Phoenix Writers Club Critique Group.
Paula lives in Glendale, Arizona, with her husband and three feral cats, who sleep under the bougainvillea in their backyard. Paula received her MS in Industrial and Management Systems Engineering from Arizona State University. She is proud of her forty-five-year membership in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
During her thirty-four-year career as a software development engineer and project manager, she started writing poetry to deal with her grief at the death of her firstborn son in a car accident. After her father died, she became responsible for caring for her mother. She then took early retirement from her engineering position, choosing to become an adjunct instructor of algebra and statistics at a local community college. With more flexibility in her hours, Paula took writing classes at Phoenix College, followed by more at Arizona State University. After eight years of teaching, Paula enrolled in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, where she earned her MFA in poetry. She enjoys writing, open mics, and the community of other writers.
Paula has poems published in various journals and in the anthologies Poetry and Prose for the Phoenix Art Museum, by Four Chambers Press, and Weatherings, by Future Cycle Press. Two chapters of her manuscript, What Sparks Story or What is Left After the Declutter, are published in The Blue Guitar Magazine and Beyond Boundaries: Tales of Transcendence.
