Mrs. Griffin- So, a little about me.... I was born on a dark and stormy night in the remote village of Hum, in Istria, northwest Croatia. As it is one of the smallest villages in the world, with only seventeen residents, books were my only playmates. I learned to read when I was a year old and when I could finally hold a book, I devoured everything that I could find. I read Chaucer and Shakespeare in my crib and graduated to Dickens, Wordworth, Orwell, and Shelley, when I was a toddler. When I turned five, I turned to the Americans and read Hawthorne, Twain, Chopin, Whitman, and Dickinson, before reaching for Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, and J.D. Salinger accompanied me to first grade and I read Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Morrison,Williams, and Miller, sitting on the swing in the sunny playground. Alas, my golden childhood was not to last.... One dark day I was captured by a band of marauding pirates in search of someone to read their treasure maps. I traveled far and wide with Captain Posh Jon Black and his crew, although I refused to read the maps for them. Instead, I spent my days teaching them to read and write, so that they could decipher their chest of maps on their own. For years we traveled from distant land to foreign shore, reading and writing poetry and devouring novels as we went. Soon, their treasure chests were filled with "I Am From Poems," "Altered Books," "Plath Poetry Projects," "American Author Papers," "Fractured Fairytales" and the like. One stormy day at sea, it was obvious that my Pirate Crew needed no help with haiku, no prompts for personification and they were completely comfortable and curiously content crafting commentaries-- or using alliteration on their own- whichever came first. Sadly, my days as a pirate were over-- but my life as a teacher would continue. I asked Posh Jon Black to drop me at the nearest port, and as we were headed up the Hudson, he told me he would drop me at the next bend in the river. As fate would have it, my pirate crew dropped me in Red Hook, with a trunkful of stories and poems, a brilliant eye patch, and a promise to come and retrieve me when my teaching days were done. That, my friends, is my story......