David Rothman is a native New Yorker. He earned a B.A. in US History/English and an M.A. in English/Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin. David has studied overseas in Sweden and has taught abroad in both Spain and The Czech Republic. As a doctoral candidate in Linguistics at the CUNY Graduate Center, he has presented his research at international conferences in both Switzerland and Scotland. David has presented on Developmental Education pedagogy at many national conferences with his partner-in-crime, Jilani Warsi. He has co-authored two national-edition reading textbooks with Jilani Warsi: Read to Succeed: A Thematic Approach to Academic Reading and Read to Achieve: Gateway to Academic Reading; and has an integrated reading/writing textbook entitled, Read Think Write, also co-authored with Dr. Warsi. David is also an award-winning short -story writer, and is currently working on a novel.

Dr. Jilani Warsi earned an MA in English at Patna University with emphasis on descriptive linguistics, historical linguistics, and language teaching. He pursued an MA in applied linguistics at California State University in Northridge (CSUN). After receiving his master's degree in linguistics from CSUN, he taught English as a Second Language (ESL) at the same university. He joined the doctoral program in applied linguistics at Boston University and received his Ph.D. in May of 2001. He has taught in all of these locations, as well as at Salem State, Fisher, and Newbury Colleges; in the Framingham State University's International Education Program in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Poland, Costa Rica, Honduras, South Korea, Northern Marianas Islands, and Taiwan, in the Institute for English Language Programs (IEL) at Harvard University where he taught Integrated Skills, Academic Discussion, Professional Communication Workshop, Communication in Business Seminar, and Academic Writing. He currently teaches academic reading and writing in the Department of Academic Literacy at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York. He has co-authored Read to Succeed: A Thematic Approach to Academic Reading; Read to Achieve: Gateway to Academic Reading; and Read Think Write: True Integration of Reading and Writing through Academic Content. His areas of interest are second language acquisition, inter-language phonology, psycholinguistics, and morphology.