Since 2004, I have been teaching writing and language, starting at UCLA as graduate teaching assistant and postdoc where I taught freshman composition courses, Reed College in the French department, and Florida State University, where I was an Assistant and then Associate Professor of Modern Language and Linguistics in the French and Spanish programs. There, I taught :

• writing-intensive intermediate undergraduate seminars in English

• basic language in Spanish, intermediate conversation and grammar courses in French and Spanish

• French and Spanish literary and cultural studies advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars

Having retired from academia to come home to San Francisco and Silicon Valley and the South Bay, I now work as a writing and language tutor for high school students, and developmental editor for scholars, alongside my research as an independent scholar.

My qualifications :

1. high proficiency in working with writers in contexts from freshman comp to faculty peer review for academic journals and university presses;

2. consistent experience in and love for coaching writers beyond my teaching career, first as a peer tutor in the Writing Center while an undergrad at Dartmouth. I subsequently worked at the Graduate Writing Center at UCLA as a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature. There I developed writing boot camps and workshops focused on the genres of the dissertation, conference presentation, and academic job materials;

3. specialization in individualized support for exceptional learners, notably gifted and "2E" young adults, and students with ADHD, neurodiverse and neurocomplex traits, or non-linear thinking.

Because writing assignments are complex multi-phase projects, they present an ideal opportunity to practice executive function skills for project management; how to transition between effective cognitive control and the divergent thinking essential for creativity; and ease in self-expression while drafting paired with confidence in revising with readerly and assessment expectations in mind.

Alongside my expertise in developing individually-tailored compositional strategies, my commitment as a coach is to help each writer learn how they best learn.

Areas of expertise :

• project management and organization skills for students with adhd or neurodiverse traits

• environmental design for students with adhd or neurodiverse traits

• meta-critical self-assessment and energy mapping to align planning and task completion with appropriate supports

• support in transitions from middle school to high school and sophomore spring to junior fall : these are the time periods where expectations for work product ramp up, and where the type of assignments change

• strategies for starting a new piece of writing and drafting raw material

• reverse engineering models to identify readerly expectations and design the structure of your own work

• writing and revising as a method to refine ideas

• rubrics for evaluating your own writing within the different expectations of various academic and professional genres

• toolkit of individualized revision techniques

• introductory language teaching to develop a solid vocabulary base and practice basic grammatical forms

• intermediate language conversation with review of grammatical concepts to support inductive language learning

• advanced language development of oral and written proficiency to practice sophisticated, idiomatic language usage