That alone says a lot but not near enough to understand the complicated life that underscores her work. She started writing at the age of eight (a story about a sickly child and the balloons that floated up to her hospital room), had parents who encouraged her poetry, was a graduate of Temple University and received her graduate degree in Cultural Anthropology and Mass Media from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, then Rome as an exchange student and the tragedy that struck her far too early in her life. Her parents died, one three months after the other.