A teacher since 1973, Nancie Atwell teaches seventh- and eighth-grade reading, writing, and history at the Center for Teaching and Learning, a K-8 demonstration school she founded in Edgecomb, Maine, in 1990. Her seminal book about workshop teaching, In the Middle, won the NCTE David H. Russell Award and the MLA Mina Shaughnessy Prize for distinguished research in the teaching of English. She is also the author of Lessons That Change Writers, Naming the World: A Year of Poems and Lessons, and Side by Side: Essays on Teaching to Learn, to name a few. She lives in Maine.