Biography

Mrs. Blunt indirectly began her career as an English teacher while helping her three daughters succeed in their high school AP English classes. It was through those at-home discussions and late-night tutoring sessions that she reignited a love for past high school English classes and all of her BYU literature classes, particularly those classes focused on great authors who directly impacted her life and attitudes with their remarkable poetry and prose. 

Her favorites remain: Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, W. Somerset Maugham, William Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Walker, William Golding, Dorothy Parker, Viktor Frankl, Chinua Achebe, JD Salinger, Ernest Hemingway and Solzhenitsyn.

Mrs. Blunt has written a novella which was picked up by a Midwest publisher. Two of her short stories were published in The Montreal Review. A few of her early poems were published by other literary magazines. She has written Sundance Film Festival film reviews for entertainment magazines and also live-tweeted the film festival for The Daily Herald.

Post-graduate work after BYU includes World Literature and Shakespeare coursework at Adams State University. Mrs. Blunt passed her Praxis exam in 2012 and then passed both American Board Certification exams in 2017, earning her Utah state license to teach secondary-level language arts in Utah. She currently holds a professional USBE license.

She loves to empower kids via grammar instruction and to help foster a genuine love of reading, thus a contextualized understanding of the world. Her philosophy is that although culture and political eras may dramatically change, people---throughout time--are still very much the same. It's a powerful thing to pick up a book, read something written 200+ years ago and feel a real human connection--to realize that somewhere someone who lived halfway across the globe in 1821, felt exactly the same way as you do right now. This is Mrs. Blunt's third year teaching 9H English at UCAS.