If you had asked me when I was six years old what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would not have said “a writer” – despite the poems that would float into my mind as I was falling asleep and demand that I get up and capture them on paper. Throughout my childhood and teens, I read voraciously and wrote sporadically, yet my love of the natural world kept me firmly on the scientific path. It wasn’t until I had earned a BSc in zoology from the University of Alberta and started working as a park naturalist in the Rocky Mountains that I realized that I could combine my passions. Two decades after I began learning to form letters into words, and words into sentences, I landed my first paying assignment, a feature story about coyotes for Canadian Geographic. I was hooked!

Since then, my writing has appeared in wide range of other magazines, including Audubon, Canadian Gardening, Canadian Geographic Travel, Canadian Living, Canadian Wildlife, Georgia Straight, Hakai Magazine, Harrowsmith Country Life, High Country News, IEEE Spectrum, Maisonneuve, Nature Canada, New Scientist, The New Territory, Reader’s Digest, The Tyee and Up Here. I’ve been a British Columbia Magazine contributing editor and a Cottage Life West columnist and have received three International Regional Magazines Association awards.

While I love the variety of subjects I get to explore through writing articles, essays and other short(ish) pieces, I also enjoy the deep-dive experience of writing books. My first book, Women of the Klondike, was shortlisted for the VanCity Book Prize and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Nonfiction. Its sequel, Children of the Klondike, won the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. And my sixth book for adults, Once They Were Hats, was a finalist for the Butler Book Prize and the Lane Anderson Award for best Canadian science book. It also led me to venture off the page and onto the airwaves, with a CBC Ideas radio documentary: Rethinking the Beaver.

These days, I mainly write books for kids. My first, Beavers: Radical Rodents and Ecosystem Engineers, received numerous honours, including being a finalist for the City of Victoria Children’s Book Prize. I had so much fun writing that book that I just kept on rolling and have now written three more in the same series, including Grizzly Bears: Guardians of the Wilderness, Owls: Who Gives a Hoot? and Bison: Community Builders and Grassland Caretakers.

I am a member the Society of Environmental Journalists and the associate editor of SEJournal Online. I’m also a member of the Canadian Society of Children’s Authors, Illustrators and Performers, The Writers Union of Canada and an alumnus of the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources and had the privilege of being Writer in Residence at Berton House in the winter of 2008. My second degree is an MFA in creative writing from the University of Victoria, where I taught creative nonfiction and journalism for six years.

I live in Victoria, British Columbia, on the unceded territory of the Lekwungen and W̲SÁNEĆ peoples, with my partner and fellow writer Mark Zuehlke.

And I still get up in the night to write down words that come to me in the dark – gifts from my muse or the moon or something equally mysterious.