A Family Business
Curiosity Compass is a mother-daughter duo! Together, Robyn Carter & Michelle Carter have over 30 years of experience teaching writing, media literacy, and literature at the K12 and college levels and over 60 years of experience working as professional writers.
The pair discovered their curriculum development chemistry in 2019 when they teamed up to co-teach a writing course at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, and have since kept the synergy kindling as TpT teacher-authors.
The Curiosity Compass team in 1972!
Writing Our Story
A graduate of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, Michelle began her career as a reporter/editor for the San Francisco Examiner, the Kansas City Star, and then the San Mateo (CA) Times. For nine years, she served as The Times’ managing editor and then transitioned to become the U.S. Information Agency’s Journalist-in-Residence in Russia.
Upon her return to California, she found her calling as an educator, teaching journalism at the high school and college level in the Bay Area until 2017. Winner of numerous journalism awards, a blogger at In Other Words, and the author of Children of Chernobyl: Raising Hope From the Ashes (Augsburg, 1993) and From Under the Russian Snow (Bedazzled Ink, 2017), she’s come out of retirement to guide Curiosity Compass through a recent expansion.
Originally Room2Ruminations, Curiosity Compass started out as Robyn’s passion project. Named after the blog where she posts her 4th & 5th-grade students’ creative work, the TpT shop’s niche was upper elementary reading and writing workshop resources.
In 2016, Robyn won a San Francisco WritersCorps Writer-in-Residence grant to fund a comic and graphic novel writing program she built to serve low-income English language learners at an elementary school in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. An initiative of the San Francisco Arts Commission, the WritersCorps placed published writers in schools, jails, and community settings to teach poetry and fiction writing.
As she worked on developing curricula with other grant recipients, they began using her writing resources with their own students at high schools and juvenile justice facilities across the city. Since the resources were editable, with a few tweaks, she learned they could work in any writing classroom and has since been adapting them for use with older students.
When her residency ended in 2022, Robyn began working as a mentor writer for the PEN Prison Writing program. In this role, she develops ELA and social studies curricula for credit recovery students at a California state prison and adapts the teaching tools she creates in this context as TpT resources for use in any middle or high school classroom.
When Robyn is not creating TpT resources or teaching writing workshops, she writes narrative-driven content for clients in the education, youth development, women’s health, travel, adventure game, arts, and nonprofit sectors, where her grant writing has generated over $300k in funds for client organizations.
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Winner of the New Millenium Award for Flash Fiction and the Prime Number Magazine Short Fiction Contest, Robyn is also the author of Impossible Object, a novel-in-stories forthcoming from Whiskey Tit Press. She blogs for Teachers & Writers Magazine and writes scripts for geo-based adventure games by ARDI and augmented reality experiences by DX Games. Robyn holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte.
Michelle Carter
