Alumni Spotlight: David LeGault
Published July 9, 2026 by Amy Ferdinandt Stolley
Current Job Title
Teacher
Describe your current position.
I teach AP English and AP History at an International School in Prague, Czech Republic.
To what extent does writing relate to your current position? What type of writing/design do you do for work?
The AP English Course I'm teaching is equivalent to a Freshman Composition course: students write personal and research essays, and we spend our in-class time reading essays, workshopping, researching, etc. In addition to academic writing, I'm also regularly applying for grants and submitting my own creative work for publication.
Please briefly describe your path from graduation at GVSU to your current position.
After graduation, I started an MFA Program in Creative Nonfiction at The University of Minnesota. After graduation, I worked for four years in a series of retail/labor jobs while still pursuing writing in my free time (including publishing a book of essays, teaching a community-education writing course, and serving as a judge for the Minnesota Book Awards). I missed being in the classroom environment, so I found a position teaching English courses at an international school in Prague, Czech Republic.
What parts of the writing major had the strongest impact on you as a professional?
They continue to be the faculty at Grand Valley State University. Ten years after graduation, I'm still on a first-name basis with many of the professors there. Although I learned a lot about being a writer and reader in GVSU classes, they continue to help me figure out what it's like to try to live a productive writing life (including advice on applying to grad school, applying for teaching jobs and applications, and pointing me toward publication and fellowship opportunities). After school, I had a hard time feeling like part of a writing community, but my strongest ties to the larger writing world continue to come from my time in the Grand Valley Writing Program.
What advice would you offer to current/future writing majors at Grand Valley?
Get involved in the Department beyond the classroom: apply to be a writing consultant, work on fishladder, sign up for the Student Reading Series, and go to the events when authors visit campus. It really is a huge privilege for it to be so easy and accessible to take part in these events, and those opportunities don't exist (or at least not as often) after you leave GVSU.