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Born and raised in the US, Rena makes her home on Galiano Island, a one-hour ferry ride from Vancouver, BC. She's a 2013 graduate of Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio and continues studying writing and publishing, while developing her writing voice. She loves to read her work in public, and co-hosted a popular reading series in Vancouver prior to moving to Galiano in 2020.

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Her first career of thirty years began after receiving her education in interior design from California College of the Arts in Oakland, California. Rena spent the first fifteen years of her career in San Francisco, before also working professionally in Seattle, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Vancouver and Los Angeles. 

 

Rena's first chapter of a memoir she was working on, The Plunge: An Unexpected Adventure in Love, was long listed for the CBC 2017 Nonfiction Prize. That memoir is currently being revised and is now titled Infallible: A Late Lover Foretold. 

 

She new creative non-fiction pieces (see News) available to read here. While revising Infallible, she is also working on a less personal nonfiction manuscript called Blastphemy: Stories of Sacred Materiality, a complex project about embodied consciousness.

 

Her earlier work was published in the Cobalt Review, The Bookends Review and in the inaugural "red issue" edition of Chroma Magazine. Two of her pieces, "Nymph Skin" and "No Roses in Roseville" have been shortlisted in The Writer's Union of Canada 21st Annual Short Prose Competition ad Malahat Review Open Season Awards. In 2019-2022, Tricycle Magazine published three of her articles. She hopes to write more for them in the future. 

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