My rural background brought me to storytelling.

Growing up in a rural Iowa trailer park led me to communication because it was my method of connection. We couldn’t afford big gifts, but my family taught me the power of storytelling to create intimacy, understanding, and affection. I learned that the stories we tell about ourselves, about others, and about our community’s matter: they can connect or destroy us. By the time I was in high school, I was spending my weekends at debate tournaments to understand how persuasion actually worked: what makes us both understand and feel an idea, and what made someone lean in instead of walking away. 

That curiosity took me to St. Cloud State, then to Southern Illinois University, then eventually to the University of Kansas, where I've spent the better part of a decade teaching, researching, and directing a public speaking program that reaches over 4,000 students a year. 

The work has taken more shapes than I expected. 

I wrote an open-access textbook so that students don't have to choose between buying course materials and buying groceries. I've edited an academic journal that isn’t hidden behind a paywall. I've keynoted conferences, worked with executives, and facilitated workshops from Denver to San Francisco. I won the prestigious William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence. 

And for the past several years, I've been going into prisons.

That work is the center of everything right now.

For months, I co-facilitated an educational intervention program for men in prisons. Each week, I’d sit in rooms with men who have caused serious harm and I’d listen, really listen, to how they talked about what they did, why they did it, what they believed about women, about themselves, and about what they deserved. I listened to their stories but, more importantly, I listened to how their stories changed over the 6-month program as they challenged themselves, one another, and worked toward accountability. Here’s what my research found: 

Violence is not a monster problem. It is a meaning problem.

The men in those rooms are not incomprehensible. They are the products of stories: stories about masculinity, about power, about what love is supposed to look like, and these are stories that our culture has been telling for a very long time. And if stories created the conditions for harm, then changing those we have to change the stories we tell. 

That's the argument at the heart of the book I'm writing, and it's the thread that runs through everything else I do.

I came to this work through communication studies, but I never stay in one lane.

I'm interested in who gets to speak and who gets silenced: in boardrooms, in courtrooms, in lecture halls, in relationships. I'm interested in the stories that organizations tell themselves, and who those stories empower or disempower. I'm interested in teaching practices that don’t reproduce harm. And I’m interested in public speaking and storytelling as the method to tell stories that both disrupt and connect. 

That's what brought me to consulting work. I wanted to take what I was finding in the research and make it useful in the world. Not as a self-help framework, but as something grounded; something that could actually hold up to scrutiny. Over the years I've worked with entrepreneurs, executives, nonprofits, organizations, always asking the same questions I ask in the classroom: What story is being told here? Who benefits from it? And what would it take to tell a better one?

A few additional things that you should know about me:

I am an Iowa native who has fully claimed Kansas City as home. I live here with my husband Mike and our two dogs – Buckley, a shar-pei, and Bingo, a rottweiler – who have very strong opinions about when it is time to stop working and go outside. I love my backyard, and you’ll regularly find me outside with peanuts to hand-feet the chipmunks and squirrels. I compete in bodybuilding, which often disrupts the image folks have about what it means to be a “professor.” I don’t mind that disruption.  I read fiction voraciously and travel whenever I can talk myself into it.

I believe the stories we tell are among the most consequential things we make. I've spent my career trying to understand why and trying to help people tell better ones.

I'm glad you found your way here.