In this post, I want to publicly thank some people who generously offered to write essays for my new book. Their writing makes The Journey is Everything a unique, useful, and beautiful book.

Two of them reside in Chaper 1: “Joyas Voladuras,” by Brian Doyle, and “Pride,” by Dagoberto Gilb. These are two of my favorite published essays—I’ve been using them with teachers and students for years, and I am grateful to the authors for granting permission to include their pieces in full.

The others reside at the very end, near the Appendix, where I have appended a set of incredible essays, written for young people, ages 8 to 18, that can be used as mentor texts for their own writing. The essays are funny, informative, angry, quirky, moving, even tear-jerking.

All the things that essay can be.

Authored by people in the fields of children’s literature and literacy education, some of their names will be quite familiar to those who read professional books about teaching writing and reading. And some, if you do not know them yet, will become familiar because they are fantastic writers. This is not the only place you can read them, and you will want to go find their work in the world: novels, poems, picture books, and books that help us teach.

Here are the authors and titles of their essays in the order in which they appear (which is a very rough “age-appropriate” order):

From: The Journey is Everything: Teaching Essays That Students Want to Write for People Who Want to Read Them. 2016, Heinemann.

I am extremely honored to sit inside the same book with all these writers, and I am overjoyed to share their essays with teachers and students.