About

Ysette Guevara has over fifteen years of experience working with children and youth of all ages. She has taught college-level Spanish, tutored ESL and special needs students in an area middle school, helped undergraduates improve their academic writing, and facilitated book discussions for bilingual families through the New York Council for the Humanities. The Posse Foundation, Project Reach Youth, and Head Start are some of the organizations through which she has volunteered as an after school tutor and writing coach.

Ysette holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Wesleyan University, where she received the tools to make sense of the world and the calling to make a difference in it. She also has a Ph.D. in Spanish & Portuguese Literatures from New York University, where she learned to straddle big ideas and discovered her intellectual fingerprint.

Earning a doctorate and changing careers are the most significant rites of passage she has undergone thus far. She approaches youth development with an educator’s discipline, an omnivorous appetite for learning, and an intimate acquaintance with transition.

Her deepest wish is to set young minds on fire so they may experience, throughout their lives, the exhilaration of being so deep in thought or so impassioned about an idea that they can feel their neurons firing. This state of mind is not so much “happiness,” but bliss.