NATALIE SCARLETT is an English and drama teacher by day and a theatrical director, writer and all around creative person all the time, especially at night. A tireless teacher, Natalie proudly coaches debate, cultivates creative writing club and directs the non-musical theatre program at Liberty Common High School. She is also chair of the Festival of Ideas and the Favorite Poem Project reading series. With the flexible schedule of a teacher, she travels extensively in the summers seeking to further her knowledge and refine her craft. In the summer of 2016 she taught English at The Gyeseong School in Seoul, Korea. The summer before she worked at the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn through a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for drama teachers writing a Shakespeare curriculum and studying with literature professors, professional directors and classically trained actors. While working in New York, she revived her desire to bring theatre alive outside the classroom as well as within, and she brings this enthusiasm to the Fort Collins community now. While studying at Columbia University, she actually got to touch a First Folio with her bare hands! She also worked writing poetry curriculum at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago under the leadership of former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Before really pursuing her teaching career in Fort Collins, Natalie backpacked through Europe for eight months while she worked as a freelance English tutor, innkeeper and bike shop keeper. She travelled the country with the Tour de Fat caravan and worked as an editor for Wolverine Farm Publishing. Natalie has a B.A. from Hillsdale College in Michigan, where she studied acting and directing. Past directing credits include Sartre's No Exit and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, as well as numerous short plays. She was the first directing student in the history of her college to be chosen to direct a mainstage play as part of her senior thesis. Natalie is also a published poet and short story writer and some of her writing can be found here. While directing is her primary passion, she has acted on the semi-professional and collegiate stage in numerous roles as various as Laura in A Glass Managerie with Harvest Public Theatre and Wilma Eisenring in a punk rock Brechtian version of Beiderman and the Firebugs. She has appeared in Bas Bleu Theatre's production of If We Are Women. She has worked on several productions with OpenStage Theatre, most recently directing Caroline M. McGraw's Ultimate Beauty Bible as well as serving as assistant director on King Lear, Bug, Amadeus, and Anton in Show Business.  Natalie and her husband, Aaron Williams,