David Smokler currently teaches English in Needham, Massachusetts. Jobs for English teachers were nonexistent, so unable to get a traditional teaching gig, Smokler accepted a job teaching juvenile offenders on a horse-drawn, cross-country, covered wagon train. He planned lessons and taught literature and writing to more than fifty incarcerated students while traveling twenty to twenty-five miles a day on horse- and mule-drawn wagons from Pennsylvania to southwestern Texas. On the wagon train, Smokler began to develop some of the experiences in this book. After another year of teaching juvenile offenders in prison, Smokler moved to Cape Cod, where he taught for four years while completing his Master of Arts in Teaching English at Bridgewater State College, where he conducted original research on simulation games. Smokler graduated from Connecticut College in 1996 with a degree in English and with teaching credentials
