Connaught (Connie) Marshner fell in love with Ireland when she was in middle school and read Seumas MacManus’s Story of the Irish Race. Ever since, she has read everything she could get her hands on about Ireland. Inspired by Padraic Pearse and Douglas Hyde, she wanted to learn Irish but never had the opportunity even to hear the language until she attended the Irish Fest Summer School in 2015. And then it was love at first fada. As her career in writing, teaching, and fundraising slowed down, her love of Gaeilge heated up, and she achieved TEG A1 and A2. In 2017, she founded the Shenandoah Gaeltacht to help keep the Irish language alive and to support authentic Irish history and culture in the northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. She earned a master's degree in Gaelic literature at University College Cork. Her dissertation, titled Ex Aegypto Transducta: Eastern Christian Influences in Early Irish Christianity, received first honors. It was later published in popular form as Monastery and High Cross: The Forgotten Eastern Roots of Irish Christianity. (Sophia Institute Press; available on Amazon) She lives in Front Royal, Virginia, from where she conducts Irish language classes on Zoom. She is President of the Saints and Scholars Foundation, which supports independent classical education in Ireland.