A smiling young woman with long brown hair sitting on large rocks on a beach, wearing a maroon tank top, dark blue jeans, and beige woven sandals.

How a zookeeper ended up in your inbox

Close-up of a zebra's face showing black and white striped pattern and eye

Email strategist, copywriter, and the very real human behind some of your favorite emails

Slices of papaya with orange flesh and black seeds arranged on a wooden plate and scattered on a white surface.

Before the laptop, there was the cheetah

Illustration of a jumping jaguar with spots, outlined in black and green, on a black background.

A woman with long brown hair, wearing a rust-colored sleeveless top and blue jeans, is sitting on a stone bench made of rounded rocks near a creek or river, holding a notebook and pen, smiling at the camera.

For eight years, my mornings started at 6 AM with large carnivores (cheetahs, lions, bears). My days were a mix of picking up poop, cooing at black-footed ferrets, and learning how each animal preferred to be approached.

I didn’t know it then, but the animals I got to know every day were teaching me something that would quietly shape the rest of my career.

Trust is not demanded.
It’s built.

See, you can't rush a cheetah into trusting you. The formula is showing up, staying consistent, and paying attention to what she needs. And even then, the trust unfolds on her timeline, whenever she decides you've earned it.

The overlap with email subscribers is almost uncanny. What a subscriber wants from you is roughly what a cheetah wants from the keeper walking into her enclosure—consistency, authenticity, the sense that a real person is paying attention… and maybe a little treat every once in a while ;)

Different species, similar principles.

A woman with long light brown hair, wearing a black t-shirt and blue jeans, stands in a bright room with a white wall background, smiling, next to a wooden table with an open silver laptop, a white mug, and a green plant.

When I discovered email marketing, everything clicked into place.

When I traded my zoo keys for a laptop, I tried my hand at lots of different types of marketing—blogs, social posts, websites. But when I wrote my first email sequence, something clicked.

Email is a place where the reader chooses to be. It’s a small, but generous, choice. And it felt to me like subscribers deserved more than constant promotional blasts and expiring discount codes.

So I built my work around that premise.

Every email I write treats the decision to subscribe like it matters. Because it does.

Favorite part of my job?

I collaborate with curious, kind, deeply compassionate business owners

In six years, I’ve collabed with ridiculously fun folks, like:

A body confidence coach
A pelvic floor therapist
A credit card points traveler
A natural spice blend company
A local farm with a meat delivery service

Very few of my clients sound like each other.
Which is exactly why I build every strategy from scratch.

A coach selling a $2,000 course needs a different email rhythm than a jewelry brand running seasonal drops. So I pay attention to how you sound when you're excited, which replies your subscribers are sending, which Tuesday subject lines move the needle. And I build from there.

A few more things, while you're here

Two green paw print illustrations on a black background.

Maryland-based, with my fiancé Will and two large dogs.

I'm a die-hard Tennessee Vols fan, born and raised in Knoxville. If you also care too much about college football, we can be best friends.

Illustration of a football with a dark green outline on a black background.

I'm still the one on the group trip who gets called in to handle the extra-large spiders and reassure everyone that the gecko hiding behind the curtain does not, in fact, want to crawl into bed with them.

A simple, green outline of a gecko lizard with spots on its back.

I'm always mid-fantasy-novel. Recent favorites: The Teller of Small Fortunes, The House in the Cerulean Sea, The Midnight Library. Recommendations welcome.