Amy Ludwig VanDerwater

Amy Ludwig VanDerwater has been a classroom teacher, a writing teacher, and a teacher teacher for many years. A believer in making things with your hands and head and heart, she is author of several children’s poetry books including Forest Has a Song (Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award), With My Hands (NCTE/CLA Notable Book in the Language Arts), Read! Read! Read! (NCTE Poetry Notable), Write! Write! Write! (NCTE/CLA Notable Book in the Language Arts), and If This Bird Had Pockets: A Poem in Your Pocket Day Celebration (“brief lessons as pleasing as they are accessible about life in the /wondrous wild.” – Publishers Weekly). In addition, she is author of picture books Every Day Birds (Junior Library Guild Selection), Dreaming of You (Kirkus starred review), That Missing Feeling (“A sweet beginner’s guide to keeping calm” – Kirkus), poems in many anthologies, and the popular classroom blogs The Poem Farm and Sharing Our Notebooks. Her most recent picture book, about taking a kindness walk, is titled The Sound of Kindness (“Inspiration to find—and perhaps spread—acts of kindness in our world.” —Kirkus), and her next book , John and Betsy (Spring 2028), is a friendship story told through poems.

Having received her MA in Curriculum and Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University, Amy taught both fifth (1993-1998) and fourth (2020-2021) grades and is author of the professional development book Poems Are Teachers: How Studying Poetry Strengthens Writing in All Genres (Heinemann, 2017). For the past 25 years, she has specialized in teaching writing workshops and demonstration lessons for children and teachers throughout the United States. When meeting with students, Amy ties her own writing experience to her knowledge of writing instruction, making clear that we can all find ideas everywhere, and through work, we can grow them. With a deep belief in the joy that comes from writing and the ways that writing can transform our thinking, Amy teaches, “Regardless of our ages, we can learn from each other as we make marks and meaning on the page.”

You can find Amy in her old Western New York farmhouse with her husband Mark, three fluffy cats, many berry bushes, piles of soft yarn, cookies in the oven, shelves filled with books, and good family and friends.

A few of Amy’s books