Authors Read Aloud

Since its inception in 1992, Learning Leaders’ Authors Read Aloud program has mobilized children’s book authors and illustrators as volunteers to help introduce elementary school students to the creative writing process and to inspire in them a love of books and reading.

    Tracy Dockray reads to 3rd graders.

Through Authors Read Aloud, children’s authors/illus­trators conduct four class sessions in which they read aloud from their own published books or works-in-progress, share their inspiration and help children write their own stories. Susie Mee, who has directed the program since 1999, helps authors develop teaching and learning activities around their work. These visits culminate in a writing workshop, in which students share their work and the author/illustrator provides advice and constructive criticism.

Mee has worked to inspire students’ love of literature and writing for many years before joining Learning Leaders. She spent twelve years with the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, which pro­vides literary arts education, and has written and edited novels, short stories, and books of poetry, including The Undertaker’s Daughter, The Girl who Loved Elvis, Downhome: An Anthology of Southern Women Writers, and Stories of the Poets, a series of essays for high school students.

Every teacher, without exception, praised the program, not only for the way it helped the students academi­cally, but even more, for the lessons in compassionate behavior that a number of these books inspired. As one teacher remarked, “Their [the children’s] minds were stretched in every direction.” Quite an accomplishment!

For more information contact Susie Mee at 646-519-8334 or email authorsreadaloud@learningleaders.org.