Carolina Segura-Ruiz Email and Phone Number

I’m a Spanish native speaker because I was born in a small town in the Colombian Andean region. When I was a teenager, I watched beauty pageant contests on TV… I noticed some of the finalists didn’t speak English when asked the infamous questions. That was the very first time I saw a translator. I got so astonished by their fluency and ease in various languages, plus realizing how easily I could learn English (thanks to a great high school English teacher), I decided I would become a translator.So, I moved to Bogotá D.C. to study languages. When majoring in Philology and Languages (English), I fell in love with poetry and pedagogy and their power to shape humans. After spending around 15 years teaching English to children, teenagers, university students, professionals, and elders, I started to grow distant from the English language. In my heart, there was a tickling desire to honor my roots and my ancestors. This yearning led me to dig into my old journals and dust off some old verses to participate in a poetry contest. Unexpectedly, my poems won... three times. This fascination for my mother tongue and my skills to teach a foreign language generated a new quest: teaching Spanish as a foreign language and poetry.Although I’m no longer planning to become a translator, I believe that learning a foreign language is like peeping through a keyhole. In the beginning, you can only see a little bit; the more proficiency level you achieve, that view widens until it’s possible to experience a vast landscape: that foreign language’s culture. When this happens, our horizons grow wide, and the limits of our world diffuse.“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”― Ludwig Wittgenstein