Justin was born and raised in northwestern Connecticut. After earning both a B.A. (cum laude and with distinction in the major) and an M.A. in Classics from Yale, he taught Latin for two years in the Nantucket Public Schools before moving across the country to pursue a Ph.D. in Classics at U.C. Berkeley. Upon advancing to candidacy at Berkeley, he returned to his beloved home state to write a dissertation entitled "Horace, Wallace Stevens, and the Sublime." Although the onset of a global pandemic and a job opening at Taft conspired to turn that "dissertation of profound delight" (to quote Stevens) into a dissertation of profound delay, he nevertheless harbors hopes of completing his doctorate in the not-too-distant future.

For the past five years, Justin has had the pleasure of serving the Taft community as a Classics and English teacher, cross country and track coach, dorm head, and class dean. He continues to devote himself to the study of classical philology, the practice of aesthetic criticism, and the reading and writing of poetry. As a scholar, he is primarily interested in influence (e.g., as manifested in Horace’s Odes, in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and in Stevens’s "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"). As a critic in the Paterian mold, he aims to seek out and to render appreciations of works which most and best yield the fruit of a quickened and multiplied consciousness. And as a lover of poetry, he hopes to empower the imagination to improve reality.