Sylvie’s greatest passions are reading, writing, teaching, and animals.
When she was in high school and during summers in college, she worked as a page and circulation desk clerk at her local library. She would come home with armfuls of books from her job there. While she didn’t read them all from cover to cover, it was at the library that her love of reading was born. Today her favorite locales in any town are libraries and bookstores, where she can spend hours browsing the stacks, finding just the right book to take home. And there is always a book (or several of them!) waiting for her to finish.
Her love of writing began with her first international penpal when both were 10 years old. As a teen and young adult she had penpals in Argentina, Japan, France, Mexico, and Brazil. In the days before email, sending letters to friends and family and receiving their replies were sources of great pleasure for her, and of course email has made corresponding so much easier and quicker. When her daughter was a young child, Sylvie began writing poems and stories and discovered that she loved to create with words. Now retired from a career as an executive assistant, she published her first children’s picture book, “Mystery at Sea – A Noah’s Ark Tale” in 2020 and her second, “The Adventures of Kodie and Bella” in 2021. Both have been extremely well received by children and adults alike. She is currently at work writing a sequel to “The Adventures of Kodie and Bella” and has more children’s books planned.
As for teaching, Sylvie majored in French and minored in Spanish and taught school briefly. She finds tutoring, i.e., helping one student at a time gain confidence in his or her abilities and understanding of the subject, to be enormously rewarding and fulfilling and has been tutoring for over 20 years. Today she tutors French, Spanish, and English on Zoom but hopes to be able to return to in-person sessions in the not-so-distant future.
With regard to animals, Sylvie has had beloved pets for most of her life and respects the intelligence, beauty, and emotional capacity of all animals. Each of the four cats she has adopted over the last two decades – and who have given her so much love and joy – had been living on the streets. She is extremely grateful to all the compassionate heroes who rescue, rehabilitate, and re-home both domestic and wild animals.
Sylvie lives with her husband, Gary, and their cat, Kodie, in New York.