Everett Lane

I have taught sophomore and senior English at the same Chicago public high school for sixteen years, in the same classroom with the same radiator that knocks like somebody wants to come in. I started writing these essays on the Red Line, on my phone, because the stories from school were piling up faster than I could tell them at dinner. I believe every teenager is a reader who has not met the right book yet, and I have a shelf of beat-up paperbacks in Room 214 to prove it. I live in Hyde Park with my wife, our two kids and a stack of ungraded essays that never gets shorter.