
health, mental health, education, pets, business and travel profiles
history, the environment, hiking, textile arts
Kyla graduated summa cum laude from Adelphi University with a Bachelor of Arts in history and anthropology. During her time at the university, she helped to found the Student History Society and served as its second president, in addition to working on the staffs of Magnum Opus, the student literary magazine, and the Delphian, the student newspaper. She was also a member of the Psychology Club and a student employee at the Adelphi University website team.
Kyla has had a number of opportunities to regularly write about health topics, particularly mental health, for PsychCentral.com and the Lodi News-Sentinel. In addition to a blog about living with OCD, she has written about NAMI, suicide prevention, Breakaway from Cancer and other topics. She has personal experience with mental illness as well as osteoarthritis and chronic migraines.
An animal lover, Kyla has written about pets in the past for Catster, Elephant Journal, Mental Floss, the Lodi News-Sentinel, and as a member of a ghost blogging team for a veterinary clinic. Her particular expertise: Cats. After losing her childhood cat to cancer and finding another feline companion with special health needs including feline asthma and food allergies, Kyla threw herself into researching feline medical issues and dietary needs. She also loves reading and writing about famous felines.
While at the Lodi News-Sentinel, Kyla conceived a series of articles about careers in the Lodi area. They included Q-and-A interviews with local people working in those careers -- from seamstresses to foundry workers to bartenders -- along with a collection of statistics and information on the kind of education each career needed, starting and average salaries for the state of California, and more.
Kyla has written a few location descriptions for real estate markets through a content marketing firm. More importantly, however, she has been a member of the copy editing team for the real estate sections of several Connecticut newspapers, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle, for several years. Though she has little hands-on writing experience, reading hundreds of real estate stories over the years has offered plenty of preparation to write in the field.
In her time as a reporter at the Lodi News-Sentinel, Kyla had the opportunity to cover agricultural topics in addition to her city hall beat. Stories have covered the wine industry -- including the announcement of Lodi as Wine Enthusiast magazine's 2015 Wine Region of the Year -- along with coverage of California's drought, a story about historic tractors collected at a local agriculture trucking business, Central Valley air quality reports, and farm to fork initiatives.
Kyla's main experience as a professional writer has been in the field of journalism. First as a copy editor for the Lodi News-Sentinel, then as news editor and city government reporter, she has worked in the field for more than 10 years. In her time as a reporter, she filed dozens of news articles on local events.
Kyla has been a blogger for more than 10 years. During this time she has had a personal blog, as well as writing blog entries professionally for PsychCentral.com and the Lodi News-Sentinel. She has also ghost-blogged for a number of small businesses through a blog-based content marketing firm. Her current main project is her blog Overcoming OCD at PsychCentral.com.