Aside from travel writers and professional surfers, I honestly think I have the best job in the world. My work each day is to read great literature and discuss it with some of the brightest and most creative young people in Florida. My job is to ask these young people to read and think carefully, to ask and answer big questions, to challenge their own ideas and beliefs and to form a more complex and adequate understanding of our world.

For someone like myself, who has loved books and ideas from an early age, my work doesn’t really feel like artwork.” It feels like fun. There is, of course, the genuinely hard work of helping students to become better writers, but I take pleasure in this as well, because it is truly rewarding to see young people improve their ability to organize and express their ideas.

As you might expect, I love poetry, and my favorite novels are Things Fall Apart, The Stranger, A Passage to India, Catcher in the Rye and Grendel. As for my educational background, I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Harvard University and an Master of Art degree in Philosophy from the New School in New York City.

In addition to teaching 10th and 11th grade English, I am the head coach of the Debate team and the assistant coach of the Boys Varsity Soccer team. In what free time I have, I read, write, tweet, play and watch soccer, go for runs along Bayshore and sun-worship at Sunset Beach.