where I came from, where I have been
where I came from, where I have been
Raleigh Native. I have lived in :
North Carolina: Raleigh, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Chapel Hill
South Carolina: Mt Pleasant/Charleston
Florida: Tallahassee
New York: Brooklyn, Queens
BOOKSELLING
Waldenbooks, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Hudson Booksellers / Ink.
My 40 Year Bookselling career started in college, when hired to help open a new Waldenbooks in Wilmington. After college, I was promoted to open & manage a new Waldenbooks in Chapel Hill in 1990. I evenutally left for Barnes & Noble in 1994 while in Tallahassee. That was followed by the opening of a new Mt Pleasant/Charleston Barnes & Noble in 2000. Then I moved to NYC's Rockefeller Center B&N in 2005. My final time at Barnes & Noble was managing the store in Forest Hills, Queens, NY.
PUBLISHING
HarperCollins/William Morrow, Oyster Point Press
I stepped into Publishing in 2006 when I joined HarperCollins as a Publicity Assistant for the William Morrow/Avon imprints. In 2009, I had been promoted into a role I created, Publicist and Event Coordinator, tasked with creating recurring events throughout the country that could reliably generate sales for touring authors. Then the recession hit and I was laid off. I was home in NC 10 days later. I continued my Author Tour Planning work as a freelancer while joining Borders at RDU. I transitioned to Hudson upon Borders' bankruptcy and eventually retired from there in 2024. Somewhere in there a friends asked me to join their publishing concern in Charleston, named Oyster Point Press. I learned some stuff, but ultimately it was more work and less reward than I would have preferred.
MUSIC RETAIL
Record Bar / Coconuts/Tracks, Barnes & Noble, Hudson
In addition to books, I concurrently logged 14 years in Music Retail, having started at the Record Bar in high school, working through my college years before promoting to Store Manager shortly before graduation in 1988. I eventually left Record Bar to go fulltime at Walden to open the new Chapel Hill store. I landed back at Record Bar/Coconuts/Tracks briefly while transitioning from Waldenbooks to Barnes & Noble in Tallahassee. Most of my Barnes & Noble years included a full music department, although LPs and cassettes were long gone by that time. When Hudson added Vinyl to our Tech on the Go store I had gone full circle.