Christine Tridente Fahey
CEO and Owner
Christine is a passionate reader and lifelong language nerd. This love of language led to two degrees in Applied Linguistics, including a master’s from Boston University, and a career of more than 25 years in the educational publishing industry. She is Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Center for the Book; helps support book access and literacy equity as founding Chair of the Board for Community Book Nook Initiative, Inc.; is Vice President of the Friends of the Hudson Public Library; is a distributor for Libraries for Liberation; and serves as Liaison for Volunteer Resources for the Boston Book Festival. Not surprisingly, she spends her free time reading, writing, and stewarding her Little Free Library while her husband and two daughters tease her mercilessly about her new need for reading glasses.
Jennifer Hodges
COO
Jen has fond childhood memories of gathering her dolls around a table—not for tea, but to complete the math worksheets she wrote. She studied Mathematics at the College of the Holy Cross, where she completed the Teacher Education Program (TEP) and student-taught at Burncoat High School in Worcester, MA. She has spent almost 30 years developing mathematics content for education.
Throughout her life, Jen has focused on helping learners build confidence and persistence, guiding them from “I can’t do math!” to “I can—and I did!” She brings a practical, student-centered perspective to her work, grounded in both instructional design and a deep understanding of how learners engage with challenging material.
Outside of work, Jen is a private tutor for mathematics and test prep. She enjoys word and number puzzles, card and board games, and cooking and baking—interests that reflect her lifelong love of logic and problem-solving. She actively supports organizations that promote access to books, community care, and children’s well-being, and is especially passionate about fostering early learning and literacy, including in her role as a proud step-grandmother to a pre-reader and numbers enthusiast.
Lance Deschenes
Senior Project Director
Lance has a background in early childhood education and cognitive psychology. For twenty-plus years he exercised his creativity and honed management skills as a pastry chef in Boston, Chicago, and New York. Back in the field of education, he wants to share his passion for literature and reading with young people and create learning materials that are good food for children’s brains.
Katherine Follett
Senior Project Director
Kate grew up in a small town in Vermont, where she cultivated loves for both reading and the outdoors. She studied English at Amherst College and received her MFA in Fiction at Emerson College. She has been writing and editing educational materials since 2002, applying her experience as an amateur naturalist to science and science-focused ELA materials. She spends her time off traveling to different landscapes around the world, which she uses as inspiration for her paintings. You can view her artwork at www.katefollettfineart.com.
Jessica Laroche
Senior Project Director
Jessica discovered her passion for writing at the age of 9 when she wrote her first ghost story. After graduating from the University of New Hampshire with an English degree, she used that passion to homeschool her two children through to college, creating dynamic yearly curricula, planning adventurous field trips, and volunteering to help develop and support the rapidly-growing local homeschooling community. When her children graduated, Jessica turned her attention to a broader audience, writing and editing original passages and educational materials for a number of publishers to help children become better readers and writers. In her spare time, Jessica writes YA fiction, most recently a hair-raising tale that involves a haunted piano, a cursed ring, and a pirate’s revenge.
Margaret Leonard
Project Director
From the first day of kindergarten, Meg knew school was her “happy place.” Meg earned a degree in Elementary Education from Winona State University, with minors in math and music, in the hopes of impacting students the way her own teachers impacted her. Following graduation, Meg spent 10 years working as a classroom teacher. Eventually, Meg decided that the kids she most wanted to teach were her own, so she left the classroom to work as a freelancer in educational publishing. Meg loves applying her classroom experience to create materials that are useful for teachers and that are relevant and accessible to all learners.