Raised in rural Iowa, she asked the editor of the berg’s local newspaper if she could be a writer for the weekly Villisca Review. Alas, she was but seven and couldn’t spell Omaha.

That said, the tales she lived to tell (and the fairytales she lived to write) are rooted in her old hometown, where, until 2013, she wrote a weekly column skewed left. It drove the natives wild. She had learned to spell Omaha.

Moriarty was a late bloomer, taking the housewife route for fifteen years before returning to finish her University of Missouri college education at Carroll University in Waukesha. Not knowing what to do with herself, she ended up with a 1977 degree in Art Education and set off to teach kids how to cut and paste. During her downtime, she painted wild abstract canvasses and participated in various exhibitions while occupying various studios in Bay View, Brewer’s Hill, Walker’s Point and the Third Ward. Five of her commissioned paintings hang in the Wisconsin Room in the student union at UW-Milwaukee. For a decade she worked for the prestigious Art Muscle Magazine and then for three more as the magazine’s publisher/editor.

The Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel has profiled her and in turn, she wrote several pieces for their Wisconsin Magazine. Milwaukee Magazine used her talents to shape gossip (The Mil), features, Insider, and you name it, she did it. A longtime visual art reviewer for the Shepherd Express (she’s still writing for their A&E section), and a former writer for the Orbit, Vital Source and Third Coast Digest, she’s pleased to have landed (in 2012) at Urban Milwaukee as their City People profiler.

In 2006, while writing for Milwaukee Magazine (Bruce Murphy was the editor), she was honored by the Wisconsin Press Club for excellence in magazine articles of 750 words or less. She came in second, iced by the author of an article about frozen custard. She holds no grudges. By the way, the article was about what happened to Samson the Gorilla, after he died…..

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