About

“Anyone can slay a dragon, he told me, but try waking up every morning & loving the world all over again. That’s what takes a real hero.”

-Brian Andreas

Loving the world over and over again does not sound particularly heroic, but it does sound like meaningful work.

I was a middle school language arts teacher from 2000 to 2022. I have been an elementary school library media center director since August 2022. I have been a Choice Literacy contributor since 2014. I have been a college instructor since 2017. And I have been working on loving the world all over again each day since 1978.

I live and work in a suburb of Chicago with my husband, Mark Levine, who is also a middle school teacher. We have a joyful pup named Santiago, after the fisherman in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, but he prefers to go by ‘Yago.’