Nancy Lewis Hennessy

Nancy Lewis Hennessy, M.Ed., is an experienced teacher, diagnostician, administrator, and literacy consultant who has worked with students and educators across grades K–12 in both general and special education settings. A former president of the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) and expert in reading comprehension, she has provided leadership in professional learning systems for educators, innovative programming for students with special needs, and has contributed to statewide revisions of special education code. She has also served on the National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities and received IDA’s Margaret Rawson Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.

Hennessy is the author of The Reading Comprehension Blueprint: Helping Students Make Meaning from Text (Paul H. Brookes Publishing, 2020), which presents an evidence-based framework for reading comprehension instruction aligned with Scarborough’s Reading Rope and the language comprehension strands. She is also the co‑author of The Reading Comprehension Blueprint Activity Book: A Practice & Planning Guide for Teachers (2024), written with Julia A. Salamone, which extends the blueprint into practical classroom activities and planning tools for educators. In addition, she has contributed a chapter on vocabulary instruction to the fourth edition of Multisensory Teaching of Basic Skills and co‑authored the second edition of Digging for Meaning: Teaching Text Comprehension with Louisa