Alumnae/i Profiles

A Life Well Read
When Michael Sartisky ’73 was nine years old, he and a friend would ride the subway from Flushing, Queens, into Manhattan, where they’d scrounge around secondhand book stores, searching for musty old marble-spined classics by Dickens and other luminaries. Today, he’s the Pied Piper of literacy, a nationally renowned educator who’s exposed thousands of children and adults in Louisiana and across the U.S. to the joys of reading and the questions of life.

The Play's The Thing
The doctor hammers a syringe into the table. A whole crowd locks itself into a dungeon. The baker stands on the table and barks. This is not a scene from a surrealist film. It’s the classroom of Sam Orans ’90, M.S.Ed. ’91, who teaches three-year-olds at the Early Childhood Center, Sarah Lawrence’s renowned laboratory preschool. Orans sits on a tiny chair in the middle of the orderly din and calmly discusses the ideal breakfast food –pizza muffins– with one of his students.

Social Context
Crystal Byndloss ’91 didn’t take a sociology class until she was a Sarah Lawrence senior. "Then I realized I had been secretly studying sociology all along," she says. "In all of my classes, I wrote conference papers about things like race, poverty, inequality and education." With her passion named, she began applying to graduate schools; a year after that first course in sociology, she was at Harvard, working on her Ph.D. in the subject.