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I BECAME SMITTEN WITH THE POWER of the written word when I was in third grade and won a poetry contest for my entry about the color green.

 

I’ve worked as a newspaper reporter, radio talk show host, magazine editor, and travel writer. I have taught journalism at a handful of American universities—Florida International University, American University, University of Florida, Northern Arizona University—and worked for 10 years as the faculty director of the European Journalism Institute in Prague, Czech Republic.

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At the turn of this century I lived in Eastern Europe for eight years, working with young journalists and media outlets in Armenia, Slovakia, Kosovo, Albania, Bulgaria, and further afield. My book, Dispatches From the Republic of Otherness, is a collection of essays about that time of teaching and learning.

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I wandered away from academia for a spell. I needed the distance, needed to gauge its gravitational forces. During that time I managed a symphony orchestra, created a business school for artists, and ran a performing arts high school in Flagstaff, Arizona.

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In 2014 a Fulbright award took me to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, for a year and reignited my passion for teaching. I have returned to it (and the Balkans) with clear, animating purpose and a strong commitment to contribute to imaginative innovation inside and outside the classroom.

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I teach storytelling at the American University in Bulgaria, and work in the region with the Center for Independent Journalism in Budapest as a media trainer, the Chisinau School of Advanced Journalism as a curriculum designer and consultant, and the Association for Community Relations in Bucharest, Romania as a journalist in residence. I am a monthly essayist forFlagLive!, a U.S-based arts magazine, create audio pieces a handful of U.S. radio stations and audio platforms, and feel most alive when I make things with my students.

 

I like what Virginia Woolf had so say about this profession that I find so deeply satisfying: To teach without zest is a crime. And I also subscribe to the ideas of Professor Gert Biesta, who calls teaching and learning "the beautiful risk of education."