Connie Shoemaker

My Cairo experience sent me on a whirlwind career in international education. On our return to Denver, I received a fellowship from the Rocky Mountain Women's Institute on the Colorado Women's College campus to develop a book, Seven Egyptian Women.

While on the campus, I met two two international eductors, Bob and Barb Sample, who were establishing an English as a Second Languge institute under the auspices of a Peace Corps training program. I joined their venture along with a Greek Cypriot, Pambos Polycarpou. We used this experience to found our own unique, academically oriented intensive ESL program. All of us had young children, new mortgages, and no capital to invest, but we bravely took the risk and second-mortaged our houses to found Spring Institute for International Studies.

A few years later, Pambos and I co-founded Spring International Language Center. We were invited to begin intensive ESL programs at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton,Colorado, the Auraria Higher Education campus in Denver, and the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

Spring International closed its doors in 2024 after forty-four years of recognition as an outstanding program of language education for students around the world. Our Egyptian experience opened our lives to the rest of the world, and our hearts even further to the many students and eductors who populated our lives.

Throughout my directing and teaching career, I continued to write both ESL textbooks and non-fiction books focusing on women of diverse cultures, ages, and backgrounds. Taste the Sweetness Later, Two Muslim Women in America, won the Colorado Book Award for General Non-fiction in 2020.