About

Dr. Miriam Marecek is an internationally known expert in reading and children's literature. With a doctorate in Children's Literature and Film from Teacher's College at Columbia University, she has taught at institutions such as Boston University, Harvard and Tufts University and has consulted for school systems across the United States. Her passion for children's literature has also been shared with parents and educators in Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, Italy, Japan and Poland.

An avid speaker and enthusiastic promoter of reading to children, Dr. Marecek believes that connecting children to books is everybody's job. She has consulted about children's literature and reading with movie producers, school administrators, parents, teachers, caregivers and pediatricians. She has also worked with architects to design places that value the connection between books and children.

Dr. Marecek currently works as a consultant for Words that Cook, an innovative new TV series that received the Broadcast Media Award from the International Reading Association in May 2005.

Dr. Marecek's three grown children can attest to the fact that this Book Lady lives in a house filled with books.

I would gratefully like to thank Uri Shulevitz, a Caldecott award artist and friend, for his illustrations on my web site and to author Joy Cowley, who once dedicated her novel Starbright and the Dream Eater to me. She was the first one to call me "the book lady", thus planting the seed for this site.