During my eight years as a special education teacher, I frequently worked with high school students who struggled to be independent readers, due to disabilities and weak decoding and fluency skills. For them, reading meant devoting their energy to decoding the text, leaving no room for expressive reading. Read more
This PRHA Contributor is Keir Graff. He is the author of The Phantom Tower.
Here’s the conundrum: as a writer, I craft my words for their effect on strangers, but I can’t read my own writing the way those strangers can. Read more
Writing novels is a strange, imperfect sort of communication: I see a story about flying ships, talking plants, fire spirits, pirates, kidnapping, and unbelievable courage in my head. Read more
You know when you meet someone who has read and loved the same book as you, and you both light up and eagerly compare favorite parts? When I meet someone who has listened to the same book, the same thing happens. Read more
Truly good audiobooks melt the ordinary world into an inconsequential puddle. The combined skill of author and narrator stimulate our senses to believe we’re seeing new sights, smelling imaginary scents, willingly traveling with characters wherever they may lead. Read more
“Tell me a story.”
It is a universal request that every child makes. Telling stories—and listening to them—are part of our human DNA, what makes people tick. Read more
From the Disney Read Along books with the magic wand sound to note when to turn the page to my dad’s collection of 1940s radio shows to the Audible app currently on my smartphone, there have always been audiobooks in my life. Read more
Who says the radio play is dead? What’s that…everyone? Okay, but hear me out. In their day, radio plays were definitely a thing. But were they good? Hell yeah they were good. Why else would I bring them up? Read more
We illustrators enter the field because we want to engage many different kinds of people with our art and communicate big ideas in innovative ways. Ours is a mass medium by design. That’s why we’ve seen so many illustrated works find their way into lush Hollywood screen adaptations—Brian Selznick’s books, or the Marvel comics movies, for example. Read more