Valerie Sutter
The day after graduating from university with a BA in French, Valerie Sutter headed off to France for what she thought would be a year of polishing her language skills. Twenty years later, she returned home to the US, fluent not only in French but in intercultural relations. She earned a Master’s degree with honors at the Faculté de Lettres de Lyon and another one in Intercultural Relations at Lesley University. She shared her passion for language and culture by teaching for thirty years in public and private schools in France, Brazil, and the US and continues to teach French to adults. Believing that total language immersion is the best means of understanding another culture and most important, one’s own, she organizes language workshops in France every summer for teachers of French through her own company, The French Traveler. She owns an apartment in Paris where she lives half the year.