Associate Podcast Producer and Collaborating Curator in Paris. I’m a recent NYU grad, and am passionate about literature and all things French. The opportunity to work on interviews with artists is really exciting to me, and I'm especially looking forward to meeting students and learning about what inspires them. I am collaborating on celebrating the art of teaching with The Creative Process and am involved in interviews and other initiatives. I enjoy teaching and have designed courses and taught at  Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, Lycée Léonard de Vinci in Bordeaux, George Watson’s College in  Edinburgh, and  Hamilton College Writing Center in New York.

I also find conversations about books and the inspiration for works of art fascinating, so it’s exciting to take part in interviews, podcasts, and learn directly from the artists I admire.

Tell us about a teacher or librarian who made a difference in your life and helped you become the reader you are today.

When I was in eighth grade, I began volunteering in a program for young readers at my local library. Every Saturday morning, I would sort through stacks of picture books at the library, rediscovering my favorite childhood stories and deciding which I most wanted to share with my audience of kindergarteners. I would then go over my book choices with the children’s librarian, Ms. Bonnie, who showed me how to properly hold books open so that I could easily turn the pages without hiding the pictures nor disrupting the flow of the story. She also taught me to pause before each page turn in order to create a feeling of suspense. “Make sure the children have time to comment on the story,” she explained, “Interruptions are the best sign that your audience is paying attention.” 

What I loved most about these read-aloud Saturdays were my feelings of excitement and anticipation before I began reading: Would the children react as I had to the story? What questions would they ask me about it? How would their interpretations change my own understanding of the story? 

Reading becomes an increasingly solitary activity as you grow older. You no longer ask your parents or another adult to read to you, and, by the time you begin college, you’re rarely asked to read aloud to your classmates. But for me, reading has always been about sharing a story: getting to know the thoughts of a writer and then wanting to talk about those thoughts with other people. I majored in English so that I could continue discussing stories and learning about other people’s reading experiences. Reading aloud to children taught me that you often learn the most about someone by watching them react to a story. Now, having finished my degree, I hope to find new ways to share moments of literary epiphany with others. 

How have you continued your studies of French literature and culture now that you have moved to Paris?
This summer, I wrote a research paper about Simone de Beauvoir’s political activism and the way she influenced her readers’ politics during the Algerian War. I spent six weeks in the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Beauvoir archive, where I was able to read thousands of letters that she received from readers over the course of her life. I plan to continue working on this project next year, ultimately crafting a piece of fiction inspired by these letters.