Christine Pakkala is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop MFA. She was a Fulbright Scholar (1994) in Helsinki, Finland, where she translated modern Finnish poetry. She taught 7th and 9th grade English at Horace Mann and has published essays in Salon, BrainChild and Serendipity and is the 2013 winner of the Ladies Home Journal essay contest. She’s the author of Last-But-Not-Least Lola Going Green, which was the winner of the Santa Monica Public Library's Green Prize, and a novel for teens, Jasmine and Maddie, which was a VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocate) Top Shelf pick and a Bank Street Best Book.Christine is working on a memoir and the first chapter of it will be published as an essay in "The Seventh Wave", an arts and literary magazine this fall.