Erika Thulin Dawes

Erika Thulin Dawes is a professor of language and literacy and chair of the Language and Literacy Department in the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University, where she teaches courses in children’s literature, early childhood literacy, and literacy methods and directs the graduate Early Childhood Education program. A former elementary classroom teacher, reading specialist, and district literacy administrator, she previously taught literacy methods courses at Teachers College, Columbia University and serves as a former chair of NCTE’s Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children.

She is coauthor of Text Sets in Action: Pathways Through Content Area Literacy with Mary Ann Cappiello, as well as Learning to Write with Purpose: Effective Instruction in Grades 4–8, Teaching with Text Sets, Teaching to Complexity, and Reading With Purpose; she also contributes ancillary materials to Charlotte Huck’s Children’s Literature and writes children’s book reviews for Language Arts. Dawes is a coauthor of The Classroom Bookshelf, a School Library Journal blog focused on teaching with children’s and young adult literature.