JACQUELINE SWEENEY BIOGRAPHY I BOOKS I PRESENTATIONS I BOOK ORDERING
teacher, musician, mom, and grandmom with a B.A. and M.A. in English Lit. from Rutgers and Purdue and a music minor from East Carolina. She likes nothing better than to go into classrooms and teach children to write their own poems and prose (which she has done in four states with Poets- in-the-Schools since 1974 and as an author-in-residence in upstate NY since 1988). Jacqueline's poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Sparrow, Negative Capability, etc., but for the last 12 years she's written almost exclusively for children, with poems and stories appearing in many anthologies and magazines (Cricket, Spider, etc.). She has published many books, including a sixteen-book We Can Read! series of *real literature* stories for beginning readers, eight professional books for teachers to help implement creative ways to teach writing (grades 2-8), and a five-book series of children's art and poetry.
Jacqueline is especially committed to bringing ethical thinking into the classroom, and focuses her writing for teachers (Scholastic Professional Books) around creative methods and themes that might accomplish this. Her teaching methods reinforce specific writing skills: simile, metaphor, strong verbs, power adjectives, alliteration, onomatopoeia, structure---which she filters through such themes as color, synesthesia (sense mixing), feelings, animals and their habitats, weather, nature, outer space, character building, literary characters and themes (and many, many more which she often tailors to a teacher's curriculum needs). For this reason, her workshops are also in great demand to help prepare students for the state writing tests. Her workshops also more than meet the new Boces (AIE) requirements to contain writing, performance, art components, etc.
She began as a special ed. teacher with a contained classroom of court committed boys (ages 12-20) where she created and implemented a successful poetry-as-therapy program and has taught in many settings from kindergarten to college ever since. She sails the classroom with a joyous ease that is so contagious even the most reluctant writers spin their idea wheels with skill and excitement and confidence in their newly unearthed abilities. Jacqueline lives in Catskill, New York.
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Jacqueline
Sweeney is a writer,