Poppy spent the first eighteen years of her life in Tasmania. Her family lived on a small farm outside of Launceston. She moved to Brisbane to attend the University of Queensland where she received a BA in English. In Brisbane, she was working behind the bar in the beer garden at the Royal Exchange Hotel when she met her future husband, a carpenter called William.

Poppy has worked as a guesthouse manager in Edinburgh, Scotland; been a nanny, ski guide and hotel cleaner in Zermatt, Switzerland; a bartender in Lagos, Portugal; and was employed on a luxury yacht on the French Riviera until she was too seasick to continue. She has worked as a newspaper journalist and magazine subeditor in Sydney and Brisbane. She now lives in Brisbane in an 1875 Queenslander cottage with her husband, three children and three cats.

Poppy works as a manuscript editor, she teaches creative writing in local libraries, and writes whenever she can.

Vanishing Falls is set in a fictional rainforest area, near the Liffey Falls, an enchanting three-tiered waterfall beneath the Great Western Tiers in northern Tasmania. Poppy has imagined a combination of the garrison village of Westbury, the charm of Mole Creek, and an elegant mansion reminiscent of Mona Vale, an 1860s calendar house near Ross.

Her first novel, Bay of Fires, was written as part of a Master of Philosophy in Creative Writing, at the University of Queensland, for which she received the Dean’s Award for Excellence.