About
I write the thing, and I write the rules for the thing.
Thirteen years in-house has taught me that the second one is what creates a blueprint for creative growth.
The short answer
I am a senior copywriter. Most of my career has been spent inside marketing departments rather than agencies, which means I have lived with the consequences of my own copy — the follow-up questions, the legal review, the version that has to work on a phone, the number in the report on Monday.
The work I am proudest of tends to be structural. At Hyatt Vacation Club I was one of two writers who launched the brand, and the piece I would point at first is not a headline — it is the copy standards in the brand book. An approved lexicon. Terms we would never use and what to say instead. The rules that let forty other people write something decent without me in the room.
I also like the small mechanical problems. A 125-character ceiling on alt text changed how an entire team wrote it, because a hard constraint forces you to decide what the image is actually for. Rules that say “be concise” never change behavior. Rules with a number in them do.
What it is like to work with me
I ask early
The annoying question at kickoff is cheaper than the expensive one at proof stage. If I do not understand the product, I will say so rather than write around it.
I read the brief and the data
Then I read the last send’s report. The previous version has usually already told you what to change.
I am easy to hand off to
Clean files, documented decisions, and a note explaining why something is the way it is. I have onboarded my own replacement before.
I like designers
Some of my best work happened because a designer put my copy in a layout and it clicked into place. I write to leave room for that.
I hold a voice
I have shifted between four sibling brands in a week and kept each one sounding like itself. Absorbing a voice quickly is most of the job.
I am comfortable with constraints
FTC rules, state disclosures, WCAG, brand guidelines, and someone’s strong feelings about the serial comma. Constraints usually improve the writing.
I am organized about volume
400-plus projects in under four years, tracked in Workfront, without losing the thread on any of them.
I am curious about the tools
I started working with generative AI the week it became available and completed formal training in it. I use it with a human review gate, because in a regulated category the model’s job is to raise questions, not answer them.
I still like this
Thirteen years in and I would still rather solve a headline than do almost anything else.
Where I have done it
Marriott Vacations Worldwide, inside GLŌ Creative & Delivery Services, their in-house agency. Three and a half years on contract, renewed quarterly, writing for Hyatt Vacation Club and supporting sibling brands across the Marriott portfolio. When my supervisor left the company, I held the copy function on my own and then trained the person who replaced him.
Blair, part of Bluestem Brands — eight years in a 50-person creative department of writers, designers, producers, and studio photographers. I started in menswear, and shaping that brand voice is what earned me the move to womenswear.
Currently, I write for Kafferlin Strategies and CiviLink — a municipal consulting practice, a govtech product family, and a thought-leadership platform, all at once. Different audiences, different registers, one person keeping them distinct.
Before all of it: two years as a newspaper staff writer, which is where I learned to call a stranger, check what they told me, and file before the page closed. That is still the foundation.
Currently