About Daisy

First and foremost, Daisy is a New Orleans lady.  Born at Touro in 1975, she attended St. Raphael the Archangel, Academy of the Holy Angels, and Loyola University, and only left The Big Easy in 2003 to pursue her PhD at the University of South Florida. Having lost her childhood home to Hurricane Katrina, she’s made a conscious effort to celebrate the colorful literary history of New Orleans, especially in her teaching.

Before Mac laptops and social media occupied all of her free time, Daisy spent her college years dancing with the New Orleans Ballet Ensemble, the Loyola Ballet, and touring France, Hungary, and Bulgaria with the Komenka Ethnic Dance and Music Ensemble.  She also performed many a musical theatre number on the stages of Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre, Rivertown Repertory Theatre, and Tulane Summer Lyric Theatre.

In 2004, while at USF, Daisy met a fiction writer named Andy one afternoon at a graduate student colloquium.  Two years later they returned to that Special Collections room in the library and he proposed.  Not wanting the stress of planning a wedding to get in the way of her dissertation writing and impending job search, they eloped in Australia in 2007.

Andy and Daisy now live in Wisconsin with their 4 cats, a turtle, and a leopard gecko.  They inspire each other to write everyday and both finished degrees in 2010—his an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Hamline University and hers a PhD in rhetoric and composition from the University of South Florida. Her dissertation was entitled Writing to (Re)New Orleans: The Post-Hurricane Katrina Blogosphere & Its Ability To Inspire Recovery and she continues to make social media and disaster a focus of her research.

As of Fall 2008, Daisy is an Assistant Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.  In addition to teaching intro-level to advanced writing courses, she serves on several departmental and campus-wide committees.  She’s really into teaching with Twitter and presented her findings on her use of the microblogging tool in the classroom at the 2009 National Conference on College Composition & Communication as well as the 2011 Computers and Writing Conference.