DAVID MARTIN was a teacher for eighteen years. He began in special education and then went from fourth grade to seventh-grade language arts. But it was his work as a first-grade Reading Recovery teacher that helped him understand the needs of “brand-new readers.”

Now retired from teaching, David works as an early reading support specialist for the Vermont Department of Education. He has written numerous books for children, including Five Little Piggies, illustrated by Susan Meddaugh and winner of a Parents’ Choice Award, and Little Chicken Chicken , illustrated by Sue Heap. As much as he loves those books, he says the most important book he’s written is a crudely illustrated, handmade book called POP. “I made this book for the young readers I was teaching and, for many children, POP was the very first book they really read. And they read it again and again. After a while, I had to photocopy the book because so many kids wanted their own. They liked POP because they could proudly read it themselves and because at the end they got to “pop” the pictures of the balloons with their reading fingers. The more they read it, the more enthusiastically they popped the balloons, and the more they laughed.”

With POP, David learned how to combine his knowledge about the kinds of books children who are just learning to read need with what he knows about writing stories that children like -- stories with good characters and good mischief. Now POP has been recast, featuring Monkey as its main character. “Monkey gets to pop the balloons,” he says, “while in other stories, he eats worms (just kidding), flies away with a kite, and makes birthday presents for his mom that only a mom could love. He is,” says David, “a bit like me.”

LEDA SCHUBERT holds degrees from Harvard University and Brandeis University and has been a school library media consultant at the Vermont Department of Education since 1987. She is a member of Vermont’s early literacy team, which is currently developing a plan to ensure that all children can read by the end of grade three. “As part of that work,” she says, “I've become quite familiar with the materials that exist to teach reading, and with the complex agenda that exists around the teaching of reading. I think what sets Brand New Readers apart is that they combine the best of the commercial publishing approach to easy readers with the best of the series that are published for school markets.”

Leda Schubert is also a charter member of the committee that organizes Vermont’s children’s choice picture book award, the Red Clover Award, and served on the 1999 Caldecott committee. She has taught graduate-level courses in children's literature for St. Michael’s College and the University of Vermont, and worked as a school librarian and English teacher for many years. Fueled by a long-term commitment to making every child a reader -- and her lifelong involvement with and love of children’s books -- Leda Schubert wrote the Winnie books with her own dog in mind. “Winnie is a nut case and runs our lives. She is funny, demanding, and delightful, and talks and argues with us about everything. I thought kids would like a book about a dog who, though clearly a dog, is also very childlike. There’s a lot of love in these stories, and I think illustrator Bill Benedict captured that perfectly.”

AMY EHRLICH is a children’s book editor and the author of more than thirty books for children, including picture books, easy-to-reads, fairy tale retellings, and young adult novels. She has worked in children's book publishing since the mid-1960s and was the founding editor of Candlewick Press. “From the time we started Candlewick in Spring 1991,” she says, “I wanted to establish a series of easy readers. I’d written three myself, Leo, Zack, and Emmie and Leo, Zack, and Emmie Together Again, about three friends in first grade; and Buck Buck the Chicken , about a pet chicken who moves in with a family. But I felt that books in this genre needed to be reinvigorated -- made fresh and beautiful again, the way the Harper I Can Reads seemed when they were first published in the 1950s.

“I was also aware of the Reading Recovery books that were being used in the early grades and had seen kindergarten children in my local elementary school library read them enthusiastically, with help only from library aides and older students. It seemed clear to me that these children were having a very positive first reading experience. The trouble was that there were no similiar books available in bookstores to help children crack the reading code at home with their parents. Many people participated in making the first Brand New Readers a reality, but I would especially like to thank the designer of the series, Amelia Edwards, who saw almost immediately what these books needed to look like and how they needed to work.”

Amy Ehrlich has now become a Brand New Reader author herself. Her two sets of Brand New Readers about Kazam, a girl magician, will be published in Fall 2001.