GAME ON: Journalism, life skills, news literacy.

Ana Valle-Greene was born in El Salvador on May 25, 1967 to a Salvadoran father and a Cuban mother. The family, which eventually grew to five children, moved to Costa Rica when she was 5 and then to Alexandria, Va. in 1979. Two years after arriving in the United States and learning a brand-new language, she joined the junior high school paper and was editor-in-chief for a semester. In high school, she was a reporter, assistant features and news editor for the newsmagazine that published every three weeks. At the University of Virginia, she was reporter, assistant editor, news editor and executive editor for The University Journal, a student-run newspaper that published three times a week. After graduating in 1989, she worked as a reporter for a small rural daily newspaper in Culpeper, Va., was editor of a small suburban weekly in Stafford, Va., and served as bureau chief of a daily called The Potomac News, for which she also covered courts.

In 1994, she joined The Ledger in Lakeland, Fla. as a copy editor and worked later as an assistant metro editor. She was an assistant city editor in Clearwater, Fla. for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times for a year before returning to The Ledger as education reporter and to marry a fellow journalist in 1999.