Growing up biking the streets of Oak Park, Illinois, Max (he/him) had no idea he wanted to be a writer until he arrived at English class his senior year of high school. His teacher’s enthusiasm for poetry was so ecstatic that Max realized he must be missing something important.
After graduating from Oak Park & River Forest High School, he attended Bowdoin College. It was in college, beneath the misty pines of mid-coast Maine, that Max fell in love with literature and philosophy. His undergraduate research focused on American modernist writers, including Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin.
Following college, Max became a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. Based in northern Israel, he helped university students hone their academic English. He has since traveled across India, where he taught English at a Montessori school in Kerala, and he is about to embark on an MA in religion, focusing on Sanskrit literature and theater.
Max has a strange obsession with writing applications. The act of writing a personal statement, he believes, inspires us to reflect on who we are, often surfacing narratives that enrich our sense of self. He loves helping students locate compelling stories from their lives in unexpected places, and he believes that expressing one’s own voice entails writing with simplicity and precision. The art of precision has been instilled in him by many mentors, and he devotedly passes on this art to his own students.
When he is not refining verbose sentences, Max enjoys recording peculiar soundscapes, baking challah for Shabbat, reciting Sanskrit in private and public, hacky-sacking with friends, and playing Wingspan with his family. He wishes he could sing, and hopes to one day learn Classical Hindustani vocals.
