THE MESSENGER (FORT DODGE, IOWA) -- Crisick was a student teacher at the American School Foundation in Mexico City and in 1970 was hired to teach English and speech at Saint Vincent Ferrer High School in Vallejo, California. She later earned a master’s degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and taught at the University of Phoenix Northern California campus.
Crisick introduced her daughters Rachel and Rebecca to poetry and, just as her own mother had done for her, she made it an everyday part of their lives growing up.
“We read poetry at the kitchen table. We would have this little ritual when they were 8 or 9 and we were going to school. I would throw out a line, say from T.S. Eliot, ‘Let us go then you and I’ — and they would give the next line, ‘As the evening is set against the sky.'”