Joshua+John+Mackin

My name is Joshua Mackin. I teach 9th and 10th grade ELA at Bread & Roses Integrated Arts High School in Harlem. My life began, screaming & crying, in a warm hospital room in downtown Manila, Philippines. I lived there (in the country, not the hospital room) for 12 years before I moved to the United States in the summer of 1998. The move occasioned a resurgence of screaming & crying & much tortured teenage soul-searching.

High school and college were spent in rural Pennsylvania among trembling heads of corn and the occasional Amish buggy. I studied English at Messiah College with a concentration in Creative Writing and, upon graduation, spent a year working in the world of international conferencing, based in Orlando, FL.

After one (thankfully) brief stint of aimless twentysomething wandering into a job at Starbucks, I was led, like a lamb to the slaughter, to Teach for America. Somehow I suckered a woman to join me and we married at the combined age of 46 in August 2009.

We enjoy cooking.