Introducing 2013 MCBF Author, Carolee Dean

Carolee Dean has made numerous appearances as a guest poet/author at schools, libraries, poetry events, and teacher conferences. In addition, she was a featured author at the 2002 Texas Book Festival. She holds a bachelor’s degree in music therapy and a master’s degree in communicative disorders. She has spent over a decade working in the public schools as a speech-language pathologist and has helped to sponsor poetry slam teams at both the middle school and high school levels.

In addition to working with students of all ages in the public schools, Carolee has also worked with teens in a psychiatric hospital and a head trauma rehabilitation unit. She teaches creative writing through a summer program.

In her first novel, Comfort, Carolee explores how words and poetry have the power to change one young man’s life. Comfort was published by Houghton Mifflin. It was nominated as a Best Book for Young Adults, received awards from the International Reading Association and the Texas Institute of Letters, and was on the TAYSHAS (Texas Library Association) reading list.

In Take Me There (Simon Pulse, Summer 2010), she follows the journey of a budding young poet who cannot read or write, but dreams of using words to escape a life of crime and deprivation.
Forget Me Not (Simon Pulse, October 2012) is a paranormal verse novel that tells the story of a girl whose life is devastated when a scandalous photo of her is texted around the school.
       
Carolee lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with her husband and children. In addition to poetry, she loves hiking and biking along the beautiful Rio Grande River and skiing wherever there are mountains and snow. She is available for author/poet visits as well as educator workshops.

For more about Carolee, visit her website.