Celebrating Women Authors in English Language Arts

In education, countless women authors have influenced the ways we teach and learn, providing insights into literacy, student engagement, equity, and more.

In observance of Women’s History Month this March, we’ve curated a selection of NCTE books by women authors that support educators at every level—elementary, middle, high school, and college. Explore these books to support women authors while furthering your professional development!

Elementary to Middle Level Books

“The voices of the teachers and students are powerful. How often do we get to spend time in each other’s classrooms to learn from masterful teaching, community building, and student brilliance? This book opens classroom doors to brilliant teaching that centers on the cultures, languages, voices, and identities of young writers and teaches us how to create spaces for powerful writing.”

— Tracey T. Flores and María E. Fránquiz, Authors
Cultivating Young Multilingual Writers: Nurturing Voices and Stories in and beyond the Classroom Walls

Already Readers and Writers, edited by Jennifer Ochoa

Already Readers and Writers: Honoring Students’ Rights to Read and Write in the Middle Grade Classroom is meant to help all middle school educators encourage their students to build literate lives both within the classroom and well beyond it.

Classroom Design for Student Agency by Lynsey Burkins and Franki Sibberson

Classrooms should be spaces where every child feels safe to bring their whole self to school. This book shows how to set up preK–grade 6 classrooms that support student agency, independence, and choice.

CoreEmpathy by Christie McLean Kesler and Mary Knight

The CoreEmpathy approach turns an empathy lens on the reading and writing essential to all K–6 classrooms, optimizing the connection between them.

Cultivating Young Multilingual Writers by Tracey T. Flores and María E. Fránquiz

This book is for K–5 educators who are interested in cultivating young writers by designing and facilitating writing instruction that begins with the resources that students bring to the classrooms from their families, homes, and communities.

Deepening Student Engagement with Diverse Picturebooks by Angie Zapata

Students benefit when stories reflect their everyday realities. This book helps educators select and integrate diverse picturebooks that will allow students to respond to their own and others’ stories through a critical literature response framework.

Nonfiction Writers Dig Deep edited by Melissa Stewart

Some of today’s most celebrated writers for children share essays that describe a critical part of the informational writing process that is often left out of classroom instruction.

Secondary Books

“One of the things I wanted to stand out in this book is the principles for choosing books. Each teacher has her own needs and her own context. It isn’t just “pick a book” and it will work. In order to get the most of the picturebook, teachers need to consider the goal and how a particular picturebook will or will not be effective for that purpose.”

— Deborah Dean, Author
Power in Pictures: Using Picturebooks to Energize Secondary ELA Instruction

Can We Talk? by Susanne Rubenstein

Face-to-face conversation offers a different and vital kind of connection, one that is at the core of our humanity and essential for a democratic society.

Personalized Reading by Michele Haiken

Unlock the power of personalized reading with practical strategies and easy-to-use ideas to engage students in the digital age.

Power in Pictures by Deborah Dean

Discover the transformative power of picturebooks in secondary English language arts classrooms.

Restorative Justice in the English Language Arts Classroom by Maisha T. Winn, Hannah Graham, and Rita Renjitham Alfred

The authors—teacher educators and a restorative justice practitioner—address critical questions, examining the intersection of restorative justice and education with a focus on processes that promote inclusivity and ownership.

Sonic Literacy by Danah Hashem and Anne Mooney

Discover how to harness the transformative potential of audio by diving into the tools, theories, and materials you need to bring audio into your classroom.

Theater, Drama, and Reading by Judith Freeman Garey

Theater artists engage in a rehearsal process to transform printed words into a world of people, space, sound, and action for the stage. Readers can learn a modified version of this process to make text visible and concrete, unlocking its meaning.

College Books

“Teaching Literacy Online provides interdisciplinary scholarly perspectives particular to writing studies that include emphasis on accessibility and social justice. These perspectives and frameworks ground the fully fleshed out teaching examples found throughout the book. We come from a background of collaborative teaching and this book is us letting others in on collaborating with us.”

— Rochelle L. Rodrigo and Catrina Mitchum, Authors
Teaching Literacy Online

Critical Rural Pedagogy by Sharon Mitchler

Sharon Mitchler argues for a reconfiguration of critical pedagogy to empower and engage American literature students at rural community colleges. She constructs an intersectional pedagogy that draws on feminist pedagogy, critical pedagogy, and conceptualizations of rural places and builds on the work of various other scholars.

The Hands of God at Work by Amber Engelson

Drawing from ethnographic data collected in Indonesia from 2009 to 2022, this book explores how an English-medium Indonesian PhD program in interreligious studies and three Muslim scholar-activists activate knowledge where languages intersect.

Living English, Moving Literacies by Katie Silvester

This book demonstrates how researchers and practitioners in writing and rhetoric studies can engage in story work across differences in culture, language, locations, and experience.

Rethinking Reading in College by Arlene Fish Wilner

Synthesizing theory from literacy scholars with strategies derived from classroom inquiry projects, this book argues for more—and more systematic—attention to the role of reading comprehension in college as a necessary step in addressing the inequities in student achievement that otherwise increase over time.

Teaching Literacy Online by Rochelle L. Rodrigo and Catrina Mitchum

Teaching Literacy Online is a practical guide for secondary and college teachers of English in digital and online environments.

Transnational Assemblages by Sweta Baniya

This book recognizes local knowledge and marginalized perspectives during disasters to create opportunities for tackling social injustices in post-disaster situations.

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