Felicity (MFA) is a writer and teacher living in Omaha, Nebraska.

Most recently, her poems “Fika on Marstrand Island, Sweden” and “StarDate: August 27, Moon and Aldebaran” were published at The Sunlight Press. Another poem, “At the Nadia Bolz-Weber Lecture,” was published in The Tishman Review.

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I’ve always appreciated my name. It means happiness. You can read it in British novels. For me, it came from my dad.

“If I have a daughter someday, I’m going to name her Felicity.” This is what he told my mom on their first date at the Pizza Hut.

When I was born, she added the middle name Jo (after the Little Women heroine), and I’ve been lucky to live my forty-plus years in the beautiful birthright of the name they gave me together.

I come from faith people – clapboard country churches and hippie Jesus freaks – and try to hold onto some for myself and the people beloved to me. I like to read Wendell Berry novels, Mary Oliver poems, and Eula Biss essays.

What do I write? I blogged for years as a writing outlet (a few posts still available here) and then was lucky enough to attend graduate school for creative writing. Now my writing rotates among poems about football, essays about God, and a middle-grade novel about a 1984 regional production of “Annie.” I want to write about everything, but too often that translates into writing about nothing.

Lucky in life, I married a piano guy. He does something else on his computer to pay the bills but he always keeps a keyboard nearby. We’re enjoying watching our four kids grow up. It really is the good life.