Grounded in Nevada

Lee Olsen has taught ELL, writing, literature, and history in nonprofit schools and colleges for more than fifteen years in the United States and Thailand. While completing his PhD in environmental literature at the University of Nevada, Reno, he taught advanced ELL at Northern Nevada Literacy Council. Having earned an MFA in creative nonfiction with a focus on place-based life writing from Western Washington University, Olsen recognized a lack of place-based literary resources in ELL. Therefore, he secured a Nevada Humanities grant to create this Nevada-centered textbook. Olsen currently teaches ELL and writing at the college level. Diana Brady-Herndon earned a master's degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Colorado. She has more than thirty years of ELL teaching experience, including at Western Nevada College. She worked as a teacher trainer and coauthored a K-12 textbook for the Carson City School District, Nevada Academic English Language Arts Content Standards Amplification Document for English Learners. Catherine Wrucke earned a master's degree in Japanese studies with an emphasis in linguistics from the University of Oxford. She has more than a decade of experience teaching ELL, including in Japan and in the elementary Japanese language program which she launched in 2018 at Western Nevada College. She is a software project manager for an academic publisher.