Kalli Dakos
Kalli Dakos was interviewed for BookCast by Fairfax County Public Library Director Sam Clay.
Kalli Dakos, a former Fairfax County Public School teacher, is the author (with her daughter, Alicia DesMarteau) of Our Principal Promised to Kiss a Pig, about a pig named Hamlet who speaks in Shakespearean verse. Her other collections of children's poems include: If You're Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand; Don't Read This Book Whatever You Do!; Mrs. Cole on an Onion Roll; and The Goof Who Invented Homework. Dakos has written more than 2,000 poems about life in elementary school classrooms.
She has also taught in the Canadian Arctic and the Province of Ontario, as well as Nevada and New York.
Kalli took a break from teaching, studied journalism at Syracuse University, and became a freelance magazine and newspaper writer.
She now travels the country giving a workshop called "A Celebration of Life in the Classroom," which encourages literacy through poetry and play. She uses toys and props in her presentations. She has a little toilet that flushes, which she uses with her bathroom poems. A child is picked from the audience to plunge the toilet. "The children are pulled into the poem through play," she says.
Visit her Web site.