Liza Libes founded her literary project, Pens and Poison, in New York City. Her writing has most recently appeared in Kveller, The American Spectator, and Paper Brigade Daily. Liza is also an entrepreneur and a classical music enthusiast. Her latest poetry collection, Illicit Kingdom, is available on Amazon.
For the past decade or so, I have worked with students to help them prepare essays for applications to America’s top colleges and universities. Many of my students have historically matriculated to Ivy League and other top-tier universities, and every year, we continue to send a handful of Invictus Prep students to America’s most coveted […]
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There’s been a lot of chatter around recent cuts to the Department of Education (ED) since President Trump announced a 50 percent reduction in the ED’s task force. On the left, teachers and administrators worry that a dip in funding will disproportionately affect low-income and disabled students, citing an unclear future when it comes to […]
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In his monumental work Culture and Anarchy, 19th-century poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold laid out a novel curriculum that would revolutionize educational spaces in the coming century. Based on the Ancient Greek system of classical education, Arnold’s ambitious scheme envisioned the university as the center of cultural education—the cornerstone for understanding ourselves and the […]
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“Do you help with the passion project?” Every so often, I’ll hop on a sales call with an inbound client at my college consulting company, Invictus Prep. Nervous parents, many of them immigrants and newcomers to the American college admissions process, will come prepared with a score of questions about how we propose to help […]
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Ivy League applications are down, and Ivy League schools have begun to panic. Over the past few weeks, America’s most coveted schools welcomed the early decision cohort of the class of 2029. Yet unlike in previous years, which saw a consistent increase in the number of applications and a corresponding decrease in acceptance rates, the […]
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A recent article in the Atlantic revealed the startling truth that students at Columbia University—one of America’s most elite colleges—are unprepared to read books. Columbia University, where I completed my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature, based its reputation on its famous Core Curriculum, a series of required courses that introduce students to the […]
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Last week, a student of mine learned that I did not identify as far left. I watched, on the Zoom call, as her pupils dilated in fascination: “But you were an English major at Columbia!,” she exclaimed. Incidents like these are not uncommon. Over on my Instagram page, where I post videos to promote the […]
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I scanned the first message I received in my Columbia University MA English group chat. Bookmarking my copy of Ayn Rand’s We the Living, a novel about the ills of post-Revolutionary Russia, I recoiled. Reviewing the text, sent by a researcher of “imperial conspiracy” in a “postcolonial context,” I felt my vision blurring. This couldn’t […]
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