Meet our team

A two-time Harvard alum (M. Ed. and MFA), and a graduate of the University of Rochester, Liz is an educator with over a decade of experience both as a teacher and college admissions specialist. While in Boston, Liz served as a teaching fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. After her first year of teaching English and writing classes at a college prep high school, she was awarded permanent teacher status, surpassing the five-year qualifying mark. Liz loves writing, acting, illustrated journaling, yoga, and spicy Thai food.

After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, Lizzie Torres received her Ed.M in Teaching and Curriculum from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. From Boston, Lizzie moved to New York City where she spent a decade teaching AP Literature and Language Arts in New York City. As a teacher, her classroom served as a lab site for city-wide inter-visitations focusing on reading and writing conferences. Throughout her tenure in New York, Lizzie served as Department Chair, Instructional Coach, College Counselor, Testing Coordinator and Coordinator of Student Affairs. More recently, Lizzie worked as the Senior Manager of Teaching and Learning for the LEARN Network in Chicago. In this role, she oversaw the professional development of teachers and school leaders across several K-8 schools. Lizzie worked with a broad range of training models from coaching individual teachers to presenting for large-scale conferences. Lizzie’s training style is collaborative, supportive and interactive. Lizzie loves green tea, and because she cannot choose her favorite, her Kindle has at least 20 great books.

Kristin has spent her life ping-ponging back and forth over the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way, she’s accumulated a pair of Master’s degrees, seven years of teaching experience, and an abiding fondness for Keats. Her work as a high school teacher gave her particular zeal for teaching poetry and writing – subjects that can feel intimidating at first, but that will reward you more richly than you can imagine. Her hobbies include writing stories, reading novels, hanging around in art museums, and animatedly explaining why Dante and Virgil always turn left.

Rebecca grew up in Paris, France, benefiting greatly from a bilingual upbringing and the strict French secondary school curriculum. While others have their sights set on the city of lights, she looked forward to the flexibility and intellectual openness of American academia. While a student at Princeton University, she was able to indulge in her academic curiosity to the fullest, culminating in a degree in the History of Science.

Rebecca has been a writer and teacher since moving to New York after graduation, and takes great joy in sharing her enthusiasm for the Humanities and Social Sciences with her students. She takes pride in tailoring her teaching style to fit the individual needs of her pupils, and in helping them realize their full intellectual potential through patient pedagogy, believing that learning is best achieved through support, collaboration, and constructive challenging.

When not found sorting through dusty archives, Rebecca is salsa dancing, reading French poetry, and inventing new vegetarian recipes.

James has lectured in the university/college classroom for over twenty-five years. He has taught American History and Literature, Writing, World History, Western Literature, and Contemporary Literature at The Fashion Institute of Technology, Long Island University, Rutgers University, and Monmouth University. Today, he teaches World History and Philosophy in a virtual classroom and is ghostwriting a book on the sports industry. His passions are his creative writing, including short stories, long fiction, and screenplays, and New York/New Jersey history and culture. He resides in Jersey City where he celebrates the local history through his many community involvements. He is a member of the Bergen Square Historical Society and is the lead organizer for Bergen Square Day, an annual Jersey City festival of cultural heritage. He loves to travel and experience different cultures.

Jennifer Gersten is an educator, writer, and violinist from New York. A Yale graduate (BA, English and creative writing), she has many years of experience teaching literature as well as ACT, SAT, ISEE/SSAT, and SHSAT and college essay and academic writing. She delights in helping students defuse academic challenges through conscientious, empathetic collaboration. For Jennifer, the excitement of teaching lies in helping her students realize new curiosities. Jennifer is the winner of 2018 Rubin Institute Prize in Music Criticism awarded by the leading writers in the field. Her reporting, profiles, essays, and classical music reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, NPR Music, Guernica, Harvard Magazine, and The Kenyon Review (online), among other publications. In February 2019, she was invited to appear on the PBS NewsHour’s “IMHO” segment hosted by Judy Woodruff as an on-air essayist and violinist.

TEACHING

University of California, Davis

• English Grammar
• Renaissance Love Poetry
• Pop Culture Shakespeare
• Writers’ Workshop
• Introduction to Literature
• Expository Writing
• World Cities
• History of Western Civilization
• Introduction to Film
• Shakespeare
• Law & Literature

Lee Emrich has taught English and History in university classrooms for the last eight years. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California at Davis. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from The Ohio State University where she graduated with honors and research distinction, winning awards for her research. At the college level, she has taught canonical courses on European history, Shakespeare, Renaissance Love Poetry, Women’s Writing, and English Grammar. She has also pioneered such courses as Medical Humanities and Pop Culture Shakespeare. Lee has also worked in editing on The Norton Anthology of Poetry and for Cambridge University Press. She loves sparking curiosity about the world and history through literature, but also focuses on rhetorical positioning in writing. In her spare time, Lee loves cooking, traveling, seeing art, playing the piano, and photography.

Kelsea Jeon is from Arcadia, CA and attended Arcadia public schools from K-12. She graduated magna cum laude from Yale University, earning a degree in History (with distinction). Her senior thesis focused on understandings of access to justice in early America and was one of four full-length theses to be selected for publication in the Yale Historical Review. She is studying Socio-Legal Research for her Master’s Degree at the University of Oxford. Her current dissertation examines how nonlawyers provided legal aid to impoverished Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kelsea also writes for the Oxford Women in Law Student Society and is a recipient of the Rotary Foundation’s Global Grant Scholarship.

Divya Sharma is a California native that is passionate about education. He has had 9 years of experience with teaching students. Divya has taught and developed curriculum of English with context of history. During his undergraduate career he was elected as the Academic Affairs Commissioner   — where he was charged with representing 30,000 undergraduate students while implementing programs to positively impact retention efforts on campus. Divya followed his passions and attended Columbia University to further his studies as a higher educational professional. In his spare time, Divya enjoys photography, running, and cooking!

A cum laude graduate of Harvard University in Government and French, Carla is an educator, director/writer, and entrepreneur based in Brooklyn, NY. She has many years of teaching experience, with success in multiple areas from SAT prep to college consulting to French to high-level debate and public speaking. Carla is passionate about helping students grow into their fullest potential and develop their own unique passion and voice as thinkers and writers. She believes that, no matter what anyone wants to do when they grow up, being a skilled writer and creative thinker is key! When she’s not teaching, Carla enjoys taking dance classes, biking around New York, reading novels, and watching movie marathons with friends and family.

Julia is a PhD candidate in English Language & Literature at Yale University. A summa cum laude graduate of Gettysburg College in English with a Writing Concentration and East Asian Studies, her doctoral research focuses on 19th-century British literary culture, the global legacy of the Victorian novel, and Japanese translation and reception history. As an aspiring college professor, Julia first discovered her passion for teaching early on in her teen years, when she founded and directed a theater troupe for middle school students in her local community in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Since then she has served in a variety of pedagogical roles as a language tutor, peer learning associate, and scholarship program mentor in her high school and undergraduate career. Her enthusiasm for collaborating with and learning from other scholars led her to an editorial internship at J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, as well as her current responsibilities as a co-convener of Yale’s 18th-/19th-Century Colloquium. When not ensconced in an armchair with a novel in hand, Julia enjoys writing letters to friends, drinking all kinds of tea, and singing Broadway showtunes.

Caitlin Doyle is an educator and writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, Yale Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Best New Poets, American Life in Poetry, the PBS NewsHour Online Poetry Series, and elsewhere. She has received awards, scholarships, and fellowships through the Yaddo Colony, the MacDowell Colony, and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, among other organizations, and she has been honored as a P.E.O Presidential Endowed Scholar. Caitlin has taught writing and literature as the Writer-In-Residence at Interlochen Arts Academy, the Emerging Writer-In-Residence at Penn State Altoona, a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University, an Elliston Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, and the Writer-In-Residence at St. Albans School. Most recently, Caitlin taught as Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Writer-In-Residence at Washington & Jefferson College. She has won numerous awards for her teaching, including the University of Cincinnati Excellence in Teaching Award, the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences Teaching Award, and a William C. Boyce Teaching Award. Caitlin is passionate about helping students develop a nuanced sense of literature’s power, purpose, and pleasure. She earned a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, where she was the Associate Editor of The Cincinnati Review. Caitlin teaches as a faculty member in the Frost Farm Poetry Conference and serves as Interviews Editor for Literary Matters.

Matt Flores (they/them) is an essayist and poet originally from South Texas. They have taught English courses at the college level that emphasize rhetoric and various forms of narrative storytelling, as well as creative writing workshops in poetry. Matt has also been an educational coach at the elementary, middle school level helping students solve their individual academic problems through creative solutions. They have served as a mentor for young students who want to fully realize their academic and intellectual interests into polished and rigorous essays. Matt obtained their undergraduate degree in English with an emphasis in poetry and critical writing on visual art, and has received fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Ideafund-Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, and The Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. Matt’s poetry has been published widely and they are also an associate editor for the literary journal Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Rory studies master degree at Columbia University in the Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology department. She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University with a degree in Integrative Biology. Although her degrees are in biology, Rory is an avid reader and writer. She filled her schedule with literature, acting, creative writing, and journalism classes in college and wrote for the school newspaper. Communicating effectively and creatively is a skill that is crucial in both the sciences and the humanities. Rory has been a teacher and peer tutor in every stage of her academic career and was an acting and playwriting teacher for young students in Boston through Harvard STAGE. In addition to teaching, Rory loves poetry, hiking, and cooking elaborate meals.

Margaret Shultz is a writer and teacher originally from Iowa City, Iowa. They studied English with a concentration in Creative Writing at Yale University and are currently in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Arizona State University, where they teach undergraduate classes in poetry and composition. Margaret’s writing has been published widely and they have received awards and fellowships from Yale University, The Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, and the Virginia G. Piper Center, among others. Margaret has many years of experience as a writing coach, teacher, and tutor working with students to develop their creativity and foster their critical reading and writing skills.

Megan Rilkoff is a middle-school place-based educator in Maine where she holds her professional teaching certificate in English Language Arts, grades 5-8. She has seven years of teaching experience across multiple subjects. She holds a Master of Arts in Teaching from Relay Graduate School of Education. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature and French from the University of Southern California where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and received The Comparative Literature Major Prize. Megan received a Fulbright grant as an English Teaching Assistant in Laos and was a 2016 Teach for America corps member. Her teaching philosophy is rooted in channeling students’ natural curiosity and passions as a driving force in the classroom.

Orion Vigil is from Albuquerque, New Mexico currently based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although he majored in biology at Harvard, Orion has an extensive love of critical reading and analytical writing, having taken courses in topics ranging from Realism in literature to the Art of Rhetoric. They also possess a strong background in theater, and most recently performed in King John with Hyperion, Harvard’s Shakespearean dramatic club. Orion teaches English and has worked as an editor for Practical Neurology in Harvard. He also keeps exploring the relationship between writing, literature and people’s cognitive, intellectual development from the perspective of the brain. He hopes to someday merge his love of writing and medicine while as a physician and being a writer.

Gabriel is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, with a wide array of research interests. Most recently, he has worked on Russian/Soviet diplomatic history and the origins of the Second World War in the Pacific. Coming from a Physics background, Gabriel is interested in the development of quantum physics in the USSR. He also works on early 20th century European intellectual history more broadly. He speaks Spanish and Russian fluently, and is currently working on reading proficiency in German and French. After moving from New York to New Jersey, Gabriel settled in Connecticut, where he was heavily involved with the Connecticut Invention Convention (CIC), an extracurricular science education program for students statewide. As a participant, volunteer, and later board member, he loved mentoring students in their individual projects. Heavily influenced by this experience, Gabriel believes that learning is most effective when incorporating students’ individual passions into their studies. Outside of academics, he enjoys singing and conducting in the Yale Russian Chorus as well as speaking at weekly political debates. At home, one might find him cooking Argentine asados or listening to classic rock.

Alex is a PhD at the University of Chicago studying how schools incorporate new arrivals into their classrooms. Prior to his graduate studies, Alex was a school teacher in Tulsa Public Schools and a school data officer in Boston. Alex has tutored students of all ages on AP history tests, PSATs, SATs, and the GRE and taught at the college level. His research involves archival analysis and situates ongoing social issues in their historical context. Alex grew up in Europe, visiting battlefields and churches on the weekends all throughout his childhood. Up to now, he has kept that passion for history alive, criss crossing the country on road trips to learn about its past. Alex is a big fan of Seattle sports teams and loves to read and cook.

Fatinah is an experienced educator who has served in many roles in education: teacher, curriculum specialist, assistant principal, and county program coordinator. She has spent many years as an educational facilitator building enormous capacity in students, parents, teachers, administrators, staff, and community members to establish shared responsibilities in achieving student success. Fatinah’s education and experience has prepared her to seek comprehensive systems-focused solutions that produce high-quality, robust learning accessible to all students. In the classroom, she found a true home teaching students in grades 6-12. Fatinah received rigorous training and effective preparation in the skills and knowledge necessary to create high-caliber, dynamic, inclusive, equitable, and culturally-responsive schools. As an educator, Fatinah strives to create cohesive learning experiences for students in all grade levels across the curriculum by using 21st century skills (the Four C’s): critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration. Finally, as a teacher of English Language Arts, Fatinah focuses on creating meaningful and supportive learning experiences that give students agency, voice and ownership of their own learning.  Fatinah loves hiking, traveling, cooking plant-based foods, meeting new people and hearing their stories.

Dawn is an educator, poet, and playwright from New York City with over fifteen years English teaching experience at all levels—from preschool to graduate school. She is passionate about creating engaging, memorable, and academically robust experiences for her students and often mixes the creative arts into the critically analytic curriculum. A specialist in Early Modern Drama (especially Shakespeare), Dawn is currently investigating prehistoric theatre and ritual on the Mediterranean Island of Malta and is currently working with a Science in the City / Malta Chamber of Scientists / Malta Arts Council grant to build a replica of a prehistoric theatre to stage a show about archaeological heritage. She is the author of several academic articles and theatre reviews; two poetry chapbooks; a forthcoming monograph entitled King James and the Theatre of Witches; and a children’s novel, Lily in the Enchanted Forest (as yet unpublished). In her spare time, Dawn also loves playing the piano, writing songs, hiking in nature, and playing with her pet rabbit, Cupid!

Lois Huang is an entrepreneur and business executive. She studied at University of McGill in Canada, after which she joined the fashion industry, developing world famous brands for companies in North America (US and Canada). Lois Huang has had a strong passion for education since she began her university studies. Her inspiration and ambition are to deliver comprehensive learning solutions to help students become more productive throughout their learning journey. She wants to help students and families to pursue better educational opportunities and achieve innovative success.