Katie Wood Ray

Katie Wood Ray is an educator, editor, and scholar of writing instruction, known for her influential work on teaching writing to children and adolescents. She has taught at both the elementary and middle school levels and served for eight years as an Associate Professor of language arts education at Western Carolina University, after which she became a full-time writer and researcher on the teaching of writing. Ray holds a PhD in elementary language and literacy from the University of South Carolina (1992) and has been an active member of the National Council of Teachers of English, including service as coeditor of the journal Primary Voices K–6.

Ray is the author or coauthor of numerous professional books on writing instruction, including Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom, About the Authors: Writing Workshop with Our Youngest Writers, The Writing Workshop: Working Through the Hard Parts (And They’re All Hard Parts), Already Ready, Study Driven, What You Know by Heart, and In Pictures and In Words. She is also the series editor for Heinemann’s Classroom Essentials books and has contributed titles such as A Teacher’s Guide to Mentor Texts, 6–12, A Teacher’s Guide to Vocabulary Development Across the Day, A Teacher’s Guide to Getting Started with Beginning Writers, A Teacher’s Guide to Reading Conferences, A Teacher’s Guide to Writing Conferences, and *A Teacher