"I graduated from Appalachian State University with a BA in English, and Hunter College with an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry).

Currently I am a lead teacher at a charter school, where I teach 10th grade. For the past two years, I taught at Success Academy High School for the Liberal Arts. Last year I taught 12th grade ELA, as well as designed the curriculum. The year was divided into two semester-long capstone courses. In the first semester I taught Creative Writing and in the second I taught Critical Perspectives (literary/critical/cultural theory). There were five sections of thirty students.

As an educator, my main job is to privilege revision and writing process. This ethos spans the entire year. In CW, students prepared a well-edited portfolio of short fiction, formal and free verse poetry, and a craft essay that justified their creative choices. Students read a variety of diverse voices ranging from Derek Walcott, Ada Limon, Larry Levis, Ha Jin, Adrienne Rich and Nazim Hikmet. In CP, students simultaneously learned research methods and dove deep into theoretical frameworks. They read theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and bell hooks, as well as watched films by Asghar Farhadi and Wang Kar-Wai. It was an interdisciplinary course that requires use of history, linguistics, political science and philosophy.

My classroom management philosophy is simple: the teacher must be consistently insistent. My students know the expectations by heart, because I am the same person every single class. I am my authentic self — slightly goofy and extremely nerdy, but demanding of a rigorous intellectual environment. My classroom requires little-to-no detentions or discipline. The students know the disciplinary penalties, but they are self-directed and engaged. When we do writing activities, I write alongside them and engage in the creative struggle. There is a sense of community. I am very fortunate to have cultivated a classroom that loves to learn and fail productively." less...