About

I am a writer, former college English professor, nature enthusiast, wildlife tracker, photographer.

Teaching writing and literature was my life for almost twenty-five years, until a vocal injury damaged my physical voice and led me to finding my voice as a writer. The months I spent struggling with painful silence taught me a few important lessons about priorities and dream building. It forced me to let go of a long-held professional identity and to examine my unacknowledged dreams of living a creative life. Facing the very real possibility that I might never speak again, I found myself reluctantly re-evaluating what it meant to be a teacher, eventually exchanging a more stable path with an entirely uncertain one in which, trepidation notwithstanding, I aspired to establish myself in a creative field.

I spent the next seven-plus years writing the book that an artist friend asked me to write about her difficult journey to finding and living her art. I was further into that project than I like to admit before fully realizing that I was on my own parallel journey. Purveyors of Light and Shadow: Two Artists Search for Meaning, written under the name Kate Calder Klein, would end up reflecting our shared stories of losing and finding art while losing and finding ourselves.

I have a Masters degree in English Literature and Rhetoric from Rutgers University, as well as a PhD in Linguistics from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Never quite able to leave my love of literature and language for my love of science, I eventually chose to pursue a doctorate in linguistics, thinking I had found the perfect amalgam of those interests. My doctoral and post-doctoral research focused on the neurobiology of language, examining how age of exposure to a second language affects how learners process different kinds of linguistic information in real time.

Long before my days as a researcher, my life as an educator began when, as a teaching assistant working on my masters degree, I had the opportunity to teach writing and literature courses. Drawn early on to the specific needs and challenges of non-native speakers, I structured my composition courses around around the specific kinds of support those learners needed but weren’t getting elsewhere in their academic experience. While teaching my first literature course, which happened to be a survey of Ancient Greek literature, I became fascinated by the intersection of language and culture and found myself in the following years returning to points along those lines. Later, my online composition and grammar courses focused again on non-native speakers. When I returned to teaching after my decade-long stint in linguistic research, I wound up on the faculty of a New York City community college, where I taught developmental writing and ESL. And finally, after my husband and I left the city for the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts, I unexpectedly found a faculty position at a rural community college, where I taught expository writing and literature courses and coordinated tutoring for ESL students.

Over the years, as our world changed, my writing courses evolved to focus on environmental themes. In 2013 I was hired as a subject matter expert on a collaboration between National Geographic and Wadsworth Cengage Learning, to produce Green, one volume in the National Geographic Learning Reader series. This reader, which includes original text and magnificent NG photographs, examines our relationship with the environment through the lens of climate change and sustainability. That project represents an important turning point in my focus on our relationship with nature.

Always something of a naturalist, in 2008 I enrolled in a ten-month-long training program in which I learned how to track a variety of Northeast species such as black bear, river otter, fisher, red fox, gray fox, mink, and bobcat. One goal was to help private land owners, conservation groups, and road management teams better understand the crucial role that habitat connectivity plays in the wilderness that these species need in order to maintain healthy populations. That adventure led to a trek through the Sonora Desert to participate in a cougar census collecting data on cougar activity in the Sky Island region near the Arizona-Mexico border. I hope to incorporate some of those inspiring desert experiences in my next book.

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