Windy City Writing Lab is an online space dedicated to assisting any individual, with any writing, at any stage. The idea for the Windy City Writing Lab came out of my own experiences and struggles with writing, language, and academia. As a non-native English speaker there was nothing that felt natural or intuitive about writing early on in life. Compounded with a culturally-insulated upbringing in Chicago's Southside, my purview of language and its dynamic utility escaped me. Thus, the WCWL actually came to fruition as a response to the disconnect that I once felt with writing.

By the time I was in 5th grade I had given up on writing and school altogether. My neighborhood public school was short on resources, my peers and I traversed dangerous commutes to school, and my teachers were too overworked to be present in the ways that they needed to be. In the 6th grade, my teacher happened across a homemade sketchbook that I kept tucked away in my desk. While I awaited reprimand for drawing during class, my teacher flipped through my collection of free-handed sketches of animals, cars, and the occasional Stone Cold Steve Austin skull logo. She returned the sketchbook and simply said "very nice, keep practicing."

At the end of the year the school hosted a weeklong Scholastic book fair, which I always looked forward to, despite never being able to purchase any books myself. At the end of the week my teacher came up to me, wished me a good weekend and handed me a stack of comic book instructional guides, a new sketchbook, Prismacolor pencils, and a thesaurus. That small gesture has been the single greatest influence on my professional writing trajectory. Today, I leverage my life and professional experiences as an artist, linguist, and a writer into the WCWL -- with the hopes of sparking in others the confidence that I was bestowed in the 6th grade.

I have spent the last two decades entrenched in public service, education, and mentoring across the city of Chicago. Currently, I teach English and First-Year Writing at a four-year university in Chicago. I am also Assistant Director of the university's campus-wide writing center, serving the entire 30k+ student body. I have formal backgrounds in education, the humanities (both in the visual and language arts fields), as well as an informal background in STEM. At this point in my career I have worked with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of youth and adult learners spanning from pre-K toddlers to senior citizen nature enthusiasts. My approach to working with writers is lead by a desire to be inclusive and transparent -- I work with anyone who is willing to share their writing with me, and I treat this work as the privilege that it is. In terms of my feedback strategies, I do not subscribe to a deficit-based model of rigid or universal revisions. Instead, I treat sessions as conversations about your writing and the goals for that writing. In this way, I hope to foster true collaboration between writers and myself.