Reading is my passion, and maybe if I hadn’t also fallen in love with teaching, I might have become a librarian just so that I could be around as many books as possible. But I’m also a big talker, and that’s a tendency that doesn’t evaporate when I cross a library’s threshold. No doubt I would have been blacklisted before I even got through my library science degree or, at the least, branded with the title “The Loud Librarian.”

Luckily for me, my experiences teaching bilingual kindergarten, first-third grade Montessori, and high school English sold me on the writing and teaching life. I especially enjoyed my three years teaching high school in Houston, where many of my students were convinced they hated to read and write at the beginning of the year and equally persuaded of the opposite by the end of the year. I can’t wait to get back into the classroom.

Right now I’m working toward a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Indiana University. That means I spend my days studying literary theory and applying it to literatures in English, Spanish, French, and (soon) Portuguese. I’ve translated one novel by María Luisa Bombal called The Final Mist (La última niebla) and hope to translate many more. My husband/best-friend Arnulfo is working toward a Ph.D. in Mathematics, so we’re fast becoming a charmingly dorky academic couple. We’d both like to teach at a public university or community college.

When I’m not reading, writing, studying, or teaching, I like to run (I did the Houston Marathon in 2007 and hope to try another course in the next year or two), bake (but let’s don’t revive the “Cookie Girl” nickname, please), watch movies, work in my garden, play with our cat, and destroy my mother in long-distance games of Scrabble. Arnulfo’s a hard-core Metallica fan who’s also addicted to Vicente Fernandez’s soulful ballads, which means I also get plenty of exposure to an eclectic mix of music.