Teacher Liz is an ESL teacher and a student of foreign languages living in Mexico. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 2022 with majors in Peace and Conflict Studies and Spanish. She has two years of undergraduate training in Arabic and studied in Jordan. She worked with Sawiyan, a grassroots English education program created by the Sudanese community in Amman. During her time at Swarthmore, she was an organizer and a campus leader of the Petey Greene Program, which brings college students into local prisons as tutors for incarcerated students. She studied Creative Writing and won a Comparative Literature award for her Spanish thesis on the subversion of Christianity in Don Quijote. In her capacity as a paid tutor and a volunteer, she taught over 35 students while in college. Recently, she worked as a reading interventionist for struggling students in Delaware’s public schools, using a phonics based curriculum to support word recognition. In 2023, she became a certified ESL teacher and works with students in both online and in-person settings. Her students vary across ages, backgrounds, and language competency.

Leah Barnes is currently finishing up her masters in English Literature at the Humboldt University of Berlin and is working on her MA thesis, which explores how literature in Scotland responded to the Cold War. She also works as a research assistant for two professors in the English department, Her work at university has accumulated in teaching three university level tutorials. At the University of Zurich, where she obtained her BA in English Literature and Linguistics and Art History, she gave a class for the first-semester students that accompanied the introductory course to literature and in Berlin, she gave a very similar one for the first semester MA students. The latter was mandatory for students to attend to obtain their master’s. The third was leading a research team at the Humboldt University of Berlin which was fully designed and led by Leah and a colleague. The team, in question, concerned themselves with how literature had reflected the history of psychiatry. Outside of academic work, Leah has held various teaching positions, starting as a tutor for children. She always tried to come up with fun and entertaining ways to teach children English, and this often-included creative writing. Creative writing also became a vital part of her child-care positions and was one of her favourite ways to engage those she was looking after. She also taught English as a second language to adults at a private language school in Zurich, VOX-Sprachschule, and volunteered to teach classes to adults with learning difficulties for the Swiss charity Insieme. Leah brought together her passion for the arts and literature by co-founding and being a co-editor of a zine from Zurich, zwischentext. This zine was sold in multiple shops throughout Zurich and published mostly poetry and shorter form narratives. It was in this zine that Leah would publish her own literary work, but its main purpose was to create a space in which topics that were taboo in Switzerland could be discussed and shown through various lenses.