Greetings From Northampton, MA

[Leslie Skantz-Hodgson]

I am currently the librarian at the oldest vocational school in Massachusetts, but when I started here 30 years ago, I was an English teacher. As I had learned very little about the Holocaust in school, I wanted to make sure it didn’t get short shrift where I taught (and I didn’t learn about Japanese internment until I took a course taught by Howard Zinn when I was a college student). The rise in hate speech/hate crimes over the past decade has given me a new sense of urgency to teach for social justice.
I am married to a 6th grade writing teacher, and we are both teacher consultants in the National Writing Project model (our home site is the Western Mass Writing Project.) We have three sons, ages 25, 23 and 18. The eldest graduated from Brandeis and is a film-maker, the middle son graduated from Boston University and lives in Brooklyn doing PR for an environmental impact firm, and my youngest will be attending Boston University in the fall, also to study film.
I live in an area filled with culture (thanks to all the colleges and artists nearby) and beautiful natural surroundings where I love to hike, bike and kayak. I have two rescue dogs; one is ancient and slow and the other is three years old and full of energy. I will talk about dogs with Sondra or anyone else who will listen!

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