A 1970 graduate of St. John’s University of New York, she spent 17 years teaching in various schools in South Carolina and Virginia. She served as an editorial coordinator for the Dahlgren Memorial Library at Georgetown University’s medical center before joining Knight-Ridder Graphics in 1989 as a researcher. She was promoted to senior researcher in 1995 and then to graphics editor in 2000. She left the service — which had become MCT Graphics — in 2014.