Who is this girl?

My name is Michelle, and I'm a recent transplant to Salt Lake City, Utah. I spent most of my life being raised in eastern Pennsylvania, but before moving to Utah, I lived in Long Island, New York, for nine years.

I'm a teacher by training: I went to college at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in New York (Long Island - the forgotten part of New York State), from which I graduated in 2007 with a B.A. in English and their undergraduate secondary English teacher preparation program. The possibility of a teaching job wasn't looking too good, so I began my graduate coursework in English, with a concentration in writing and rhetoric, at Long Island University in Brooklyn. My inability to find a teaching job prompted me to move back to Pennsylvania in late 2009. I was fortunate enough to get a job teaching developmental and college English at Lehigh Carbon Community College in January 2010.

I had begun to date a Salt Lake City-based pilot around this time. He must have liked having me around, because on July 16, 2010, he asked me to marry him. I officially moved to Utah in September 2010; we're getting married in May 2011.

I blog a lot about teaching, politics, looking for work, planning our wedding (which will be held back in Pennsylvania), and our traveling adventures.