Jenia Walter, who has been writing stories since she could hold a pen, first found her way into publishing as an editorial assistant at North Point Press in Berkeley, California. Discovering her interest in teaching English while traveling overseas in 1992, she received a certificate from a Cambridge University TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) program in Portugal, returning to the U.S. to teach refugees and youth-at-risk at a social service agency in Sacramento. After teaching community college classes in rural northern California, she returned to graduate school at Northern Arizona University (NAU) to earn a Master's degree in English in 1999. At NAU, her fascination with grammar led her to work as a research assistant on Douglas Biber's LONGMAN GRAMMAR OF SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH. At the same time, working as a Writing Center tutor and graduate teaching assistant in freshman comp classrooms, she began to investigate helpful learning methods for linguistically diverse students with nontraditional academic backgrounds, and she has been researching effective writing instruction for adult learners ever since. She spent over a decade conducting action research on hands-on learning as an Associate Professor of English at San Juan College in northern New Mexico, where she conducted a grant-funded developmental writing research study and was awarded a NISOD National Award for Teaching Excellence. Since relocating to Fort Collins, Colorado, in 2012, she has continued her exploration of interactive online teaching methods while teaching developmental writing and composition (including Accelerated Learning Program cohorts) in the classroom at Aims Community College in Greeley, researching the effectiveness of hands-on learning at every level.