Alissa's Spiel

For the last four years, I've generally classified myself as a "geek" - my degree is in Information Technology and I went to an engineering school - but only recently have I re-aligned myself with my former world of writing and bookwormitude.

I'm 22, and I moved to New York City in June 2005 to work in technology at an investment bank after a run-in with the GREs and serious consideration of a master's in journalism (ditched, because I wanted to live in NYC and didn't want to pay tuition anymore). I now reside in Greenwich Village, which teems with aspiring artists and writers and wannabees, and attend the Village Church. I love New York. Where else can you see a punky teenager reading Dostoevsky on the subway?

I edit the Career and Finance section of Relevant Magazine's online edition, and I write for them fairly regularly (see here and here for recent articles). I also keep a blog with ever-increasing traffic, to my ever-increasing astonishment. I concentrated my major in college in communications. I was homeschooled from 6th grade to the end, and worked through the Christian Writer's Guild program in high school. I also spent four years as the editor of the local homeschool support group's 16-page monthly newsletter. This spring I'm taking two classes at NYU in an attempt to get some good writing criticism - Freelancing for the Novice Writer and Film & Media Journalism.

After four years in the intellectual wasteland into which one plunges when studying software design, reading only about mundane things such as heap sorts and algorithm analysis, I've jumped back into my voracious reading habits of old. I'm particularly partial to fiction from the last two centuries and theology. I also attempt to read the New Yorker cover-to-cover every week, an education in and of itself. And I'm working on expanding my poetry and postmodern fiction vocabulary.

A few of my most beloved writers are C.S. Lewis, Flannery O'Connor, Michael Lewis, Francine Rivers (some of the best fiction on the Christian market), John Piper, e.e. cummings, William Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda, and Bill Bryson.

And lastly, I was known in college as the proofreading nazi, having missed my true calling as a copyeditor. My grammar has gone downhill in my own world, but I still compulsively correct everyone else's.

This year's reading list is outlined on my blog, so expect to see some of those in the near future.