This piece featured on Emerging Civil War in October 2025 shares my poem about two soldiers finding shared humanity beneath a Virginia dogwood. The poem Under the Dogwood Tree is about two friends and soldiers who fought together during the battle of the Wilderness, Virginia, in May 1864. In this instance, neither side, North nor South, is identified. This poem was inspired by Drew Gilpin Faust’s book This Republic of Suffering[1] and the accompanying PBS documentary Death an

This article featured on Emerging Civil War in July 2024 tells the story of Asia Booth Clarke, John Wilkes Booth's sister and lifelong confidante. “So runs the world away”[1] It was these five words placed at the very end of the memoir of John Wilkes Booth by his sister, Asia Booth Clarke, that captured the heartache and heartbreak of a woman, who because of her brother’s crime, became a woman of the Civil War. Not from a direct action of a Civil War battlefield, but from a s

This piece featured on Emerging Civil War in August 2024 shares my experience as the National Park Service Artist in Residence at Manassas National Battlefield Park. The Artist in Residence Program sponsored by the National Park Service offers a wide variety of artists the opportunity to live and work on the National Park Service grounds and bring to the community their experiences through their artistic works. These programs offer artists the opportunity to experience living

This essay featured on Emerging Civil War in June 2025 examines the forgotten voices of the Civil War, those whose stories were lost to history. The premise of my Civil War poetry is that not everyone who experienced the Civil War made it into the history books. What of all those unknowns? Who were they? What happened to them? Of course, I could not give them a name or a face; however, I could provide them with a voice, a voice to tell their story through the rhyme and narrat