Lillian A. Stevens is a bilingual/ESL specialist whose work has spanned a decade of service in the New York City public schools. She came to teaching as a Teach for America corps member, where she was placed in a linguistically and ethnically diverse K-5 school in the Bronx as a dual language (English-Spanish) teacher with experiences as a first, second, and fourth grade teacher. Lillian was actively involved in curriculum design, specifically targeting the development of her students’ bilingual literacy skills. Transitioning into a teacher support role, Lillian designed a formative bilingual writing assessment for teachers’ to administer over a two-year period in order to bolster the writing development of the student population. Her interest in empirically studying bilingual literacy growth, particularly writing development, motivated Lillian to further develop her skill set as an educational researcher. As a doctoral student in Bilingual Education at the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University, she has expanded her interests to consider a range of topics that may influence emergent bilingualism among US English Language Learners.