Nancie Atwell teaches seventh-and eighth-grade writing, reading, and history at the Center for Teaching and Learning, a K-8 demonstration school she founded in Edgecomb, Maine, in 1990. Nancie was the first classroom teacher to receive the NCTE David H. Russell Award and the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize for distinguished research in the teaching of English. In 2003 she received the NCTE Edwin Hoey Award for Outstanding Middle School English Teacher. Nancie is the author of In the Middle, Side by Side, Lessons That Change Writers, Naming the World: A Year of Poems and Lessons, and The Reading Zone.