SITE CONTENTS
• Home
• Contact Jim
• Trelease Bio
• Jim Retirement Letter

JIM'S BOOKS
• Read-Aloud
      Handbook
• Hey! Listen to This
• Read All About It!

Author Profiles
• Wilson Rawls
• Beverly Cleary
• Gary Paulsen

BOOK EXCERPTS
• Read-Aloud
    Handbook
• "Trip to Fenway"
• Author profiles

Jim Trelease Bio Page

graduate of the University of Massachusetts ('63) and native of New Jersey (Orange, Union and North Plainfield), Jim Trelease was for 20 years an award-winning artist and journalist before turning his career toward education in 1979 when he wrote the first edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook.

While working for a Massachusetts daily newspaper (the Springfield Daily News, now the Springfield Republican) as an artist and writer, he began weekly volunteer visits to community classrooms, talking with children about journalism and art as careers. At the same time, he and his wife Susan were raising their two children (Elizabeth and Jamie). A daily ritual for Jim was reading aloud to his children, largely at that point because his father had read to him. (On the eve of retiring in 2007, he donated his personal collection of 2000+ children's books to the library at Mary A. Dryden-Veterans Memorial School, the school where he made his first volunteer visit and now named after the fourth-grade teacher who invited him to visit her class.)

Soon, however, the nightly ritual would coincide with one of his classroom observations.

Most of the students he visited (about 40 schools a year) didn't read very much for pleasure, but the ones who did nearly always came from classrooms where the teachers read aloud daily and incorporated SSR time (sustained silent reading) into the daily routine.

Making Connections

Thinking there might be a connection between being read to and how much the child wanted to read, Jim investigated to see if any research was available on the subject. Sure enough, there was lots of it— but nearly always published in education journals or written in academic language that would be foreign to the average parent or teacher.

Jim's proselytizing on behalf of reading aloud can be traced as far back as the early 1940s, as seen in this photo of him reading a comic book to a neighborhood friend. (Whether Jim had anything to do with the boy's broken foot is a story for another day.)

The dearth of accessible material inspired him to write and self-publish the first edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook in 1979. "I self-published because I never thought any of the major publishers would be interested in it. At that point, 'reading aloud' was too simple and not painful enough to do the child any good. At least, that's what many educators thought," he says in hindsight. But that mindset would soon change.

Discovered accidentally by a then-fledgling literary agent named Raphael Sagalyn, the book came to the attention of Penguin USA after six other publishers turned it down. In 1982, they published an expanded edition. Touted by "Dear Abby" in February of 1983, it spent 17 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. (Covers and details of all U.S. and international editions can be found at Read-Aloud covers.)

By 1985, the U.S. Department of Education's Commission on Reading was calling "reading aloud to children" the single most important activity one could do to raise a reader.

he first Penguin edition of the Handbook was followed by six more U.S. editions, along with British, Australian, Spanish (Manual de la lectura en voz alta), Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Indonesian versions. It was the inspiration for PBS's "Storytime" series, and is now the all-time bestselling guide to children's literature for parents and teachers — nearly 2 million copies sold to date world-wide. (The seventh edition is excerpted at this Web site.) In 1989, Trelease was honored by the International Reading Association as one of the eight people who made the largest contributions to reading in the 1980s.

The Handbook is now used as a text for future teachers at more than 60 colleges and universities. In addition, the Japanese edition introduced the concept of Sustained Silent Reading (chapter 5) to public schools there and it became the basis for more than 3,000 elementary and secondary schools adopting SSR as a regular part of the academic day.

In 1983, Trelease left daily journalism to lecture and write full time.

Featured on "The Larry King Show," profiled in Smithsonian (Feb. '95), Reader's Digest (July '95), and U.S. News & World Report (Mar. 17, 1986), Trelease was one of the U.S.'s most sought-after education speakers, addressing parents, teachers, and librarians on the subjects of children, literature, and television. He presented in all 50 states and was a frequent keynoter for national education conferences. His final year of public lectures and seminars was 2008 but he continues to maintain his Web site with reviews of new children's books.

Between 1979 and 2008, Trelease's work was a pivotal force for numerous read-aloud movements in both the U.S. and abroad. Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, Nebraska, and Hawaii launched state-wide campaigns based on Jim's book and seminars, as did one European country. The founder of that particular movement can best explain the circuitous circumstances of that effort:

The origin of the article that inspired Mrs. Kozminska's campaign is a story unto itself and can found here at Smithsonian.

Jim's seventh and final edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook was published in 2013. It included a chapter devoted to the new technology and its challenges for literacy: iPads, e-books, and online reading and learning. None of those items existed when the first Penguin edition of the book appeared in 1982.

In 2018, Jim chose Cyndi Giorgia, a children's literature professor at Arizona State University, to revise and update future editions of the Handbook, which would be henceforth called JimTrelease's Read-Aloud Handbook. The eighth edition was published in September 2019.

Now the grandfather of three boys and two girls, he resides with his wife Susan in Enfield, Connecticut.

Jim retired from public speaking after three decades in 2008. In his retirement letter here, he offers a retrospective look at those 30 years, including the highs and lows, his most harrowing moments, and the people whose friendship and guidance were so important to him.

Trelease also has compiled two popular anthologies (Penguin) of favorite stories for reading aloud (both excerpted here): Hey! Listen to This ( for kindergarten to fourth grades) Read All About It! (for preteens and teens)

lthough Jim Trelease remains a critic of sports-obsessed fathers who think the purpose of school is to put a "ball in the hoop" instead of a "brain in the head," he remains an enthusiast for sports as coached by the John Woodens rather than the Bobby Knights. From his former career in journalism, his sports cartoons are included in the permanent collections of the Basketball and Baseball Halls of Fame. But his most enduring sports "achievement" was with one of the most famous games in NBA history: On Mar. 2, 1962, Trelease tape-recorded in his UMass dormitory room the final quarter of the radio broadcast in which Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points.

Although he didn't realize it until 30 years later, that recording would become the "Zapruder" tape of that historic game — the only recording of the game's famous moments, as noted in Gary M. Pomerantz' book, Wilt, 1962: The Night of 100 points and the Dawn of a New Era (Crown, 2005, p. 203). Trelease's personal explanation for his decades-long association with Chamberlain can be found at Wilt and Me.

On the morning of March 23, 2016 (my 75th birthday), the Library of Congress announced the Wilt Chamberlain 100-point recording was one of the 25 added that year to the National Recording Registry, preserving it for posterity as one of the most significant recordings in America's oral history. It was the most unusual birthday present I ever received. NPR's coverage of that selection can be found at: https://youtu.be/1NsyHu8AGiE.

Another sporting event, more personal, occurred to Jim during his nation-wide travels: a kind member of his audience in California one night heard him mention that his childhood idol was Vin Scully, the famed Dodger announcer. Several years later when she saw that he was returning to the area, she secretly arranged for him to have coffee with Mr. Scully. That, in turn, became the subject of a public radio story that can be found at Dick Gordon's The Story.

* Note there is no mention of anything affiliated with "Fox News."