Lee Carroll began her teaching career in the late 1960s at a small, 7-12 school in rural Indiana. After a year driving snowy country roads in an under-heated Volkswagen, she moved to California and found a great two-bedroom ocean-view apartment for $175 a month in the not-yet-gentrified Ocean Park/Venice area. She taught and learned eagerly from students at Dorsey High in the Los Angeles Unified School District for ten years. When she had the opportunity to move to an unfinished loft in New York, Lee, always a glutton for education, worked for a TA's pittance while earning her MA at NYU and continued in the PhD program at USC. (Lots of acronyms here!) In both programs, she arm-wrestled graduate advisers to take credited courses allowing her to pursue eclectic interests in writing and rhetoric, sociolinguistics, literacy, and contemporary literature.

Lee retired in May after twenty-two years as an English professor at Pepperdine. She was looking for a volunteer opportunity with the fun parts of teaching—kids, books, writing, interesting colleagues—without all the boring bureaucratic bits. Her favorite 826LA experiences have been hearing Venice High students' life stories as they write their college application essays and reading Silly Sally with second-graders.

Stephanie McCanles has directed a lot of theatre in Milwakuee, Chicago, and New York City. She has more recently worked on a lot of forgettable TV. She has a lot of credits that she could list, but she chooses not to. She has a degree in Playwriting and writes across genres.

Stephanie likes kids and the absurd things they write. She is also a food purist who enjoys sucking the fun out of snacktime whenever possible by suggesting that while Flamin' Hot Cheetos are digestible, that doesn't make them "food."

In a former life (but actually this life, circa 2007), Jennifer Pringle was a high school English teacher and yearbook adviser (yes, she says, adviser is spelled correctly with an e). She gave up this glamorous life of essay-grading to go into yearbook publishing, which now allows her to work in schools all around LA. Jennifer is grateful that 826LA has given her an opportunity to do things she never thought possible: transforming space blankets into time-travel ponchos, embroidering an ice cube, and seeing students in drop-in tutoring actually look forward to doing their homework.

Doireann Sheridan hails from Dublin, Ireland, where she's been teaching elementary school students for several years. She's been on an extended holiday in LA since her husband moved here for work. Doireann has found herself a rare breed in LA: she is not at all involved in the entertainment industry, and she loves her job as a teacher. Earlier this year she completed her Masters in Education, earning a first class honours for her thesis on Content-Area Literacy Support for English Language Learners.

When not at 826LA, Doireann can be found frequenting the movies, shopping, walking by the beach, writing stories about LA, and making long-distance calls to friends back home. Her absences from 826LA are generally due to long trips back to Ireland, where she gets fed up with the weather after two days.