Name the location of one of the photos: town, city, or body of water, and I’ll email you a sneak peek at the cover of my next book—weeks ahead of when I reveal it in a blog post!

Hard to believe that a week from now I will be meeting with writers in Monrovia! Sponsored by CODE, “Reading Liberia” is a program through which books written by Liberian authors for Liberian children will be produced, and teachers trained how to use them in their classrooms. Thanks to IBBY-Canada who put my name forward to…

We did so much during the workshop hours, and yet there’s so much more that we didn’t do. I read a few responses to writing exercises while there, and more on the plane coming home – “neighbourhood” and “personal hero” pieces, and moving accounts of experiences participants had when they were five, ten, and fifteen years…

How do I capture in a brief blog entry some essence of my time in Liberia so far? Already I know it will be hard to say goodbye to the people I am getting to know here – the We-Care Library staff, the writers, the teachers, and the other people CODE has sent over from…

On Monday I visited three schools in Monrovia, along with Wendy Saul, a professor from Missouri who has been working with teachers here, and Florence (I don’t know her last name), one of the teacher-leaders. Our purpose was to assess how well the classroom teachers we visited were applying what they’d learned about teaching reading,…