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One of the ten winning paragraphs—and, it must be noted, the only submission whose theme was feline in nature—was submitted by north-sider Ann Heinrichs.
Heinrichs's submission:
Get that [*******] animal off my keyboard!” he roared—apparently abandoning his (short-lived) enthusiasm for her new kitten. Clearly, the honeymoon was over: first, the tantrum over hairs in the sink; next, the brouhaha about the napkin rings; and now, the paroxysm aimed at Tippy. Jenny’s mind raced over her options: Should she leave him . . . or should she kill him?
In an e-mail Heinrichs says that she used to be associated with the Reader—in the 1970s, she was the paper's first classical music critic. Since then she's been a book editor, an advertising copywriter, and most recently the author of juvenile nonfiction on history, geography, culture, and politics. She's in the midst of a career transition: Heinrichs recently obtained a master's in library science, and has a part-time gig in the Poetry Foundation's library.
All that aside, though, Heinrichs's interest in grammar stems from an earlier source: nuns. "When I was in grade school under the tutelage of the good nuns of Fort Smith, Arkansas," she writes, "we had a big fat grammar textbook and a grammar workbook every year from third grade on. I ate the stuff up. The puzzle of language could be solved! The bucking bronco of human communication could be saddled and broken! Just learn the rules. So I did."
Update: Heinrichs wrote in again to say that she also authored a children's book on punctuation.