Chris Cryer

Chris Cryer is a veteran English instructor and Montessorian who taught her way through backwoods-predominately-Black schools in the deep South to eradicate illiteracy in at least one Jackson, Tennessee elementary class and create the first black high school debate team in Baton Rouge.

As Montessori Directress at Tuskegee University, she lived on campus in the guest house next to the former offices of George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington, a life of fried chicken and international visitors, many from Africa.

She developed and established three Montessori schools, using skills learned from her Xavier University grad program under Hilda Rothschild, one of Montessori's own students in Italy.

In Saudi Arabia she became enthralled with the ancient Bedouin ethic and the Saudi rush for modernity in one. She was able to create her own position to define, explain,and prepare the first model for Saudi university preschool training in the Montessori Method, received by the Saudis with unparalleled sophistication and enthusiasm.

"Tolstoy in Riyadh" is Chris's tribute to her students--the beautiful, Saudi, Berkeley-educated teachers at King Saud University faculty preschool; Tolstoy, her cultural mentor; and Saudi Arabia itself, for making her world meaningful and rich.

Today, Chris teaches English at Ventura College and lives by the ocean in California, where she's been a principal of a modern co-ed Muslim elementary, staff editor and writer for an international Muslim news magazine, and a reviewer for the Levantine Cultural Center in West L.A.