Bio
These days, I’m primarily an English tutor and the founder of Kafka Consulting LLC, an editorial and educational consulting company, but I came to this work in a roundabout way.
I began my career at Pond Press, the book-publishing company of acclaimed photographer Henry Horenstein in Boston. I printed photos in the darkroom (Remember those?), walked Henry’s dog, managed the office, and eventually edited sections of several books, including The Photographer’s Source, a whole-earth catalog for photography.
Following that job, I attended the graduate program at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. After a summer dream internship at Travel & Leisure magazine in New York, I decided, for the capstone project of my master’s degree, to edit and design my own book, with contributions from about 50 undergraduate and graduate students, about a Missouri River town called Boonville.
After earning a master’s degree in 1992, I came to Washington, D.C., to work as a photography editor at Agence France-Presse, an international news agency, and later became a reporter and editor for Museum News, a magazine published by the American Association of Museums about museums, zoos, historical societies, and botanical gardens.
My next position, media consultant for Corbis Corporation, Bill Gates’s other company, involved negotiating with museums and historical societies for the digital rights to images in their collections.
In 1996, I married Alex Kafka, a talented journalist and photographer, and in 2000, a couple of years after giving birth to twins, I began doing freelance editorial work for a variety of publications, including America Online Digital City Destinations, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and TWINS Magazine, for which I was a columnist for several years.
In 2005, I began a two-year program at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development to get certified to teach English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) in public schools. At Kennedy High School and Walt Whitman High School, both in Montgomery County, Maryland, I taught a diverse group of 9th to 12th graders from five continents.
Although I enjoyed teaching in the classroom, I regretted that I couldn’t give many students the one-on-one attention they needed, so in 2015, I threw caution to the wind, quit my teaching job, and founded Kafka Consulting LLC, which now keeps me busy seven days a week. My clients include K-12 students, college and graduate school students, and adult professionals. I also do some volunteer tutoring with students from The Children’s Inn at the National Institutes of Health. When time allows, I still do some freelance editorial work.
What I love most about my job is that I sometimes get to discuss books by Trevor Noah, Sandra Cisneros, J.D. Salinger, Tobias Wolff, Joan Didion, Bryan Stevenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jason Reynolds, e.e. cummings, and Amanda Gorman with my students all in the same week. Working on college essays with seniors is another one of my favorite activities. Through this intensive process, I get to see the culmination of our years of effort in storytelling, grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure. Coaching my impressive students as they launch themselves into the world is a particularly rewarding part of my job.
Through all of these phases of my career, I’ve shot photos, some of which are on this website. For the most part, I’ve resisted the temptation to share photos of family members because, let’s face it, due to the volume, that might require another whole website. The photos on this site include pictures from my documentation of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts construction project in Boston, my work for the Columbia Missourian in graduate school, pictures of a family I documented in West Poland, Maine, many years ago, and trips to the Middle East, Cuba, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, the West Coast, and other locations in the U.S. and abroad. They also include some images from here in Bethesda, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. More recently, I’ve begun abstract painting, and I’ve included some of these images on the website as well.