Hey! Most of my family and everyone who's known me since I was a kid call me Ree. I used to keep my writing under the pen name Eillya-Marí Kocumba, mainly because I didn't want my graduate advisor to know how much time I spent not working on my dissertation (apparently that's supposed to be a 24/7 gig), and also because when I was on the job market, I wanted my academic work to be what potential employers found. Now that I'm graduated and employed (praise God!), I feel like it's time to drop the pen name.

Um...I don't really know what you want to know about the person writing the blog that you won't surmise from reading the blog. 😂

In short, I am on a lifelong journey to be closer to God, I love to read (and write), contrary to the amount of poetry on the site I'm actually a Computer Scientist, I play 3 instruments (flute, oboe, and piano), I grew up on a family farm, and now I live with a cat named Bubbles.