Marcus Reese: to most students he is merely known as a teacher, a great one at that, yet to Rockford Guilford High School in Illinois he was known for much more. Reese was no average student. He was involved in numerous sports and rigorous classes. I didn’t grow up always wanting to be a teacher,” Reese said. Throughout the course of his high school years, Reese was on the school football team, in student government, ran track, took rigorous classes, was involved in the literary magazine (one of his poems was submitted and published too) and became class president of his senior class. “The best way to categorize me,” Reese said, “would have to be involved.” During his junior year Reese had life guard class first period, and every Friday Reese and other classmates would go out to breakfast to a new place each time. Soon after, students were invited, teachers, the principal, and even the school board. “We called it the Breakfast Club,” Reese said. Sadly, the school board never made it to breakfast, yet Reese and his friends gladly enjoyed the company of their school’s principal. Also around junior year, was the year Mr. Reese decided that he wanted to get involved with literature. “I believe in the power of stories and the power of education,” Reese said. His belief then led him to study literature at the University of Colorado Boulder. “As a kid I liked to read, yet I cannot say I was actually good at it,” Reese said. “If anything I think it was the fact that I was better at remembering what I read, so I would not call me a great reader, but I am more of a remember-er.” Reese was read to as a child by his grandmother, which to this day is a memory he refuses to let go. In 1998 Reese found his way to Hooper Bay, Alaska where he became a youth counselor. A few years later he moved to Anchorage, and that is when he started teaching at A.J. Dimond High School. Mr. Reese is happily married and has a four year old daughter named Greta, two year old son named Ole, and a baby on the way. He continues to stay in Alaska because that is where is sees his roots. Simply starting as a boy who liked to read, to playing football, to starting the “Breakfast Club,” to running for senior class president, then attending a college in Colorado, he has finally found his home in Alaska and has found what he does best, teaching literature to students.