I've been doing this work in pieces since before I had a word for any of it.

The stories started first. As a kid I was already writing them down, just because I wanted to. That habit turned into an AA in Print Journalism at Union County College, where I served as News Editor and Arts & Entertainment Editor at the college paper, The Scroll. From there I wrote and edited for Forbes Newspapers' local publications and City News Publications, freelanced across NJ and NY, and moved into book publishing at Renaissance Media and the Smith/Skolnik Literary Agency.

The genealogy came shortly after, when my maternal grandmother started teaching me what she knew of our family tree. This was well before digitized records, so it meant real digging: conversations with relatives, letters, courthouse visits. Forty years later, that one family line has grown into what I call a genealogical forest, and I've spent almost as much time helping other people trace their own.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, I became the person people asked to help plan things: weddings, cotillions, fundraisers, webinars, every kind of gathering in between.

Vysyons itself started in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1996. It wasn't a legacy yet. It was communications, event coordination, and editing work, one client at a time, for individuals, small businesses, nonprofits, and community programs.

The real shift came sideways, when I found myself managing MySpace and Facebook pages for live bands in New York City in the mid-2000s, years before "social media strategy" was a job title. That sent me back to school. I earned my Bachelor's in Public Relations at Tulane University, where I founded the college's PRSSA chapter and became its president, building it from nothing into an award-winning organization. It confirmed something I'd suspected for a long time: the strategic and the creative were never as separate as people tried to make them. I remain active in PRSA today, nationally and through the New Orleans chapter.

In 2014, I moved to New Orleans, a city that had been pulling at me for years, inspired in part by my favorite author, Anne Rice, whose sense of place and ancestral weight shaped how I understood both storytelling and the South. I met her in 2015. She was everything I hoped she'd be.

New Orleans is central to this work, not incidental to it. The genealogy, the events, the cultural identity behind everything Vysyons does, all of it makes more sense here than anywhere else.

Vysyons Communications is back now, not as a side project, but as the full practice it was always meant to be: four pillars, Communications & Media, Heritage & Legacy, Events & Engagement, and Editorial & Publishing, finally organized, finally home.