About Denis Sorenson

Denis Stanley Sorenson is a graduate of Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah) and an alumnus of Arizona State University (Tempe, Arizona). With degrees in Portuguese, international affairs, and public administration, his interest in world politics--and particularly Latin American affairs--has never wavered. He also believes that among the shortsighted and unwise are all those who fail to keep up with and involve themselves in domestic politics.

An inveterate polyglot, his language skills range from fully fluent to "trying really hard to speak, read and write the ten most spoken languages on earth." By way of understatement, he claims that if he were deposited in Spain, Portugal, Brazil, France, or Germany, he speaks the languages "well enough to avoid starvation." Right now he's working on Russian and Chinese, finding the non-phonetic "hieroglyphics" of written Mandarin to be his biggest challenge so far.

A family man, Denis and his wife Clarissa have nine children, of whom seven are married. There are approximately twenty-eight grandchildren (he says approximately because "you never know when there will be another one").

Residents of Salem, Utah, Denis and Clarissa have a driving interest in effecting significant change in the way language arts are taught in the public, private, and charter schools--not to exclude the home-schoolers. She is a charter school second-grade teacher during the academic year, and in the summers exercises her talents as a certified instructor for non-profit "Spalding Education International." Holder of a master's degree in reading specialization from Arizona State University, she teaches teachers how to teach children to read, write, and spell this phonetic language of English. Her twenty-plus years of instructing children and their teachers have convinced her there is no more practical nor effective method for language arts instruction than "The Spalding Writing Road to Reading."

Almost-Doctor Denis Sorenson, PHD--ABD (all-but-dissertation) recently retired from the everyday world of work, now concentrates on his dissertation and book writing; gardening (BIG garden); songwriting, guitar skills, keyboard mastery, bass playing, singing, and recording with both vintage analog and state-of-the-art (for another week or two, at least) digital recording applications and devices.

An award-winning essayist, he expounds--at times polemically--on varied subjects about which he is most passionate.