A St. Louis native and longtime English teacher, Edward Scott Ibur is the director for the St. Louis Literary Award founded in 1967 at Saint Louis University. Under Ibur's tenure, the award recipients have included Margaret Atwood, Stephen Sondheim, and most recently, Edwidge Danticat. Edward Ibur is also the director of Gifted Arts, a creative arts program for writing and visual arts he started in 1997 (https://giftedarts.org/). Ibur is currently working on his second novel and lives in University City, MO.
A middle school teacher spends an academic year on professional probation with three "interventionists" (shadows)—a wise Sherpa, a retired army general and a hip-hop MC—all recruited to save Eisenberg's career, which is threatened by the No Child Left Behind law.