Write! Teach! Repeat!

Lesley Younge has been a progressive educator in independent schools for 20 years. She earned her graduate degree from Bank Street College of Education and is currently a middle school English teacher at Maret School in Washington, DC.

Lesley’s poetry and short stories have appeared in Poetry, Callaloo, Mid Atlantic Review, Bay to Shore, Little Patuxent Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, West Trade Review, Midnight & Indigo, The Plentitudes, Full Bleed, and others. She is a fellow of Storyknife, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Hurston/Wright Foundation and Anaphora Literary Arts.

She is also the author of four books:

• Nearer My Freedom (co-authored with her mentor, Monica Edinger) is a YA found verse novel that uses Olaudah Equiano’s seminal autobiography as source text.
• A-Train Allen, her first picture book, was the inaugural Own Voices, Own Stories Grand Prize Winner awarded by Sleeping Bear Press. Two books focused on the Civil Rights Movement are forthcoming.
• Soulforce: James Lawson and the Nonviolent Nashville Campaign is a picture book about the desegregation of Nashville and the founding of SNCC.
• Playbook for Justice: James Lawson and the Nonviolent Movement in America is a combination of biography, American History, and guide to nonviolence for young people 10+.