As someone enamored with English literature, it only made sense for Sarah Shahan to take the fifth-year master’s option after finishing a BA in English at APU in 2019. So she took that extra year, completing an MA in English in 2020. The path, however, wasn’t as smooth as it sounds. “During senior year,” said Shahan, “I was about to apply for an MA in Education. However, this caused me to wrestle with a deep, unsettling feeling that I was choosing the wrong career path.”
Today, Shahan is the founder, owner, and director of Page Turners Academy, an education center in Sierra Madre, California, where Shahan provides English literature and language classes for a variety of students. “My goal is to make reading and writing enjoyable again,” said Shahan. “So often, reading and writing are offered up as chores for students. Through my business and teaching, I aim to remind students that we are naturally inclined to stories and communication because we are first naturally inclined towards connection.”
Shahan’s goal goes back to her struggle over which path to take after her undergraduate years. “Many people told me that pursuing a credential and graduate school in education was ‘safe’ and the right choice for me,” she said. “However, I knew my first love was literature and language.” Shahan partially indulged this love by beginning her career as a teacher. “I have been a teacher for nearly nine years,” she noted. “My training and ability to read texts, decipher language coding, and understand context have been the backbone to my success in reaching my students, because it’s not just about texts and context—it’s about reading people, understanding their backgrounds, and discovering their behaviors that make them who they are, and then meeting them at that level.” Shahan has made, studied, and honed these connections as a writing professor at APU, which she cites as a great foundation for her academy. Shahan feels that choosing her love over the safe option was the right choice: “The second I decided to abandon ‘safety’ and chase English, a weight lifted off of me and I felt an eerie peace. That’s when I knew that, firstly, God is revealed through peace, and secondly, I was meant to discover the depths of literature and language.”
APU proved to be the perfect training ground for Shahan’s English studies for many reasons. “APU has impacted my professional and personal communities,” she said. While at APU, Shahan had several meaningful moments throughout her undergraduate and graduate programs, but the most meaningful were the times that helped her build a community. “When professors invited students into their homes, their offices, or to events outside the classroom, it facilitated close relationships that further encouraged my personal growth.” Today, her students and clients “trust the expertise of my educational background,” but Shahan has found that she’s also able to “connect with others in spiritual, interpersonal ways, greatly due to APU’s cultivation of my personal faith.”
Thanks to APU’s faith integration, Shahan sees Christianity as not just what she believes, but as the lens through which she sees the world. “My education encouraged this,” she said. “I realized that it was the only lens that allowed me to see clearly the reality that is around me. Studying literature allows me to understand humanity, but Christianity allows me to understand literature.”
In 2019, Shahan was the first winner of APU’s annual Esselstrom Prize for writing, then went on to win a Fulbright Award in 2020, was published in Mallorn (a peer-reviewed journal of The Tolkien Society) in 2021, and even published her first children’s book, The Purple Ballet Tree, in 2022 through Two Rivers Publishing. “My dreams and goals changed in several ways over the years,” said Shahan. “I never thought I would own a literature and language business, but it has truly brought all the pieces together in my life and has allowed me to use my education to the fullest.”
From where she is today, it’s hard to not be impressed by how much Sarah Shahan has done, or not have high anticipation of what she’ll do next. “Many people told me that I ‘would never find a stable career’ down this path,” said Shahan. “They were wrong.”
Shahan expects to complete a second MA, this one in Tolkien studies from Signum University, in 2024.
