"The most important 20 minutes of your day...
is spent reading to a child."
Jim Trelease
A graduate of the University of Massachusetts ('63) and native of New Jersey (Orange, Union and North Plainfield), Jim Trelease was for 20 years an award-winning artist and journalist before turning his career toward education in 1979 when he began writing the first edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook.
While working for a Massachusetts daily newspaper (formerly the Springfield Daily News, now the Springfield Republican) as an artist and writer, he began weekly volunteer visits to community classrooms, talking with children about journalism and art as careers. At the same time, he and his wife Susan were raising their two children (Elizabeth and Jamie). A daily ritual for Jim was reading aloud to his children, largely at that point because his father had read to him. (On the eve of retiring in 2007, he donated his personal collection of 2000+ children's books to the library at Mary A. Dryden-Veterans Memorial School, the school where he made is first volunteer visit and now named after the fourth-grade teacher who invited him to visit her class.)
Read more of Jim Trelease's Bio on his website http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/bio.html.
