*boasting alert*

    Hi! I should probably tell you about myself as a writer, even if you were here to find out some other kind of thing! I write (wrote?) the cooking and lifestyle blog Ben & Birdy. I'm not sure why I wrote "lifestyle." Maybe I mean the kind of lifestyle where you sew your hand to a maple leaf garland while drinking pinot noir. 
    I have written the grown-up parenting memoirs Catastrophic Happiness (Little, Brown) and Waiting for Birdy (Penguin). I have also written the middle-grade novel One Mixed-Up Night (Random House), Stitch Camp, which is a kids' craft book I co-wrote with my friend Nicole, and the award-winning bestselling skill-building books for kids How to Be a Person and What Can I Say? (both from Storey). My first adult novel, We All Want Impossible Things, is out now.
     I have also written about kids, parents, teenagers, food, cooking, love, loss, gender, eating, death, sex, politics, books, babies, snakes, foraging, relationships, crafts, holidays, travel, and fortune telling for lots of magazines, newspapers, and online publications, including the New York Times, O the Oprah Magazine, The Boston Globe, Romper, Self, The Huffington Post, FamilyFun, Parents, and Full Grown People. I am a regular contributor to the Cup of Jo website.
     I was, until recently, the etiquette columnist at Real Simple for ten years, even though yes, I swear a lot and don't know what an oyster fork is. I edit the James-Beard-Award-winning nonprofit kids' cooking magazine ChopChop.
     My work has been in lots of books and anthologies, including On Being 40, the fabulous Unbored series, The Bitch in the House, Oprah's Little Book of Happiness, and the Full Grown People collections.
     I've also done plenty of consulting, public radio commentaries, readings, talks, workshops, and TV appearances. 
     Two random things: I have a PhD, and I'm the secretary of Creative Writing at Amherst College.