About the Author

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, Montessori grades 1-3, 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.

Right now I’m working on a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Indiana University (I'm finally ABD!). That means I spend my days studying literary theory and applying it to literatures in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. I’ve translated one novel by María Luisa Bombal called The Final Mist (La última niebla) and hope to translate many more. I also teach undergraduate courses for my department, including literature about vampires and a course on women writers of the Caribbean. My husband and best friend Arnulfo is working toward a Ph.D. in math education, so we’re fast becoming a charmingly dorky academic couple. We’d both like to teach at the university level.

When I’m not reading, writing, or teaching, I am hanging out with our little boy, Liam Miguel. He keeps me very, very busy. In the scraps of time that remain, I also like to run (I did the Houston Marathon in 2007 and the Chicago Marathon in 2009), bake (but let’s don’t revive the “Cookie Girl” nickname, please), watch movies, work in my garden, and destroy my mom in long-distance games of Scrabble. Arnulfo’s a hard-core Metallica fan who’s also addicted to Vicente Fernández’s soulful ballads, which means I also get plenty of exposure to an eclectic mix of music.

P.S. Awesome schools, programs, and places that have shaped my path: Bard College at Simon's Rock, The University of Texas at Austin, the German House Co-op, ACE (an Americorps program), Teach for America, and Indiana University.