Ann Jaramillo

Ann Jaramillo has been a middle school teacher in Salinas, California since 1971. She has taught new immigrant arrival teenagers from Mexico and students of Mexican descent born in Salinas, California. She is proud to be married to her husband, Luis, an attorney representing migrant farmworkers, for thirty-eight years. (Don’t get her started talking about her writer son Luis and his partner Matthew, or alternative-energy son Mateo and wife Virginia or most of all, new granddaughter, Carolina Clover.) Her family is famously all about words, from Grandma Petie who could recite poems she had memorized sixty years before, and composed many herself, to Grandma Dorie, champion Scrabble player and poet herself. She wants all young people to know and feel the power of words to both change lives and the world.