Suzanne Barchers has a bachelor’s degree in elementary Education from Eastern Illinois University, a master’s degree in education from Oregon State University, and a doctorate of education in curriculum and design from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
After teaching for fifteen years, Barchers served as education director and deputy director of the Children’s Museum of Denver, designing exhibits and programs, obtaining grants, and managing staff.
After the publication in 1990 of her first book, Creating and Managing the Literate Classroom, she began her career in publishing. She built Teacher Ideas Press, the teacher resource division of Libraries Unlimited, into a viable profit center. She next developed a line of books for teachers, parents, and children for Fulcrum Publishing, a trade publishing company in Colorado.
From 1990-1999, Barchers taught graduate classes at the University of Colorado, Denver. Courses included curriculum development, children’s literature, language arts, and expressive arts.
She continued to write for the education market, completing two college textbooks, a variety of books on readers theatre, four educational cookbooks such as Storybook Stew: Cooking with Books Kids Love, and award winning books such as Wise Women: Folk and Fairy Tales from Around the World. Barchers wrote 36 elementary math and social studies readers for Teacher Created Materials, 23 books for the LeapFrog SchoolHouse decodable series, and five books for the LeapFrog Phonics Kits, bringing her total number of published books to more than 90. She has more than 40 articles in print and has spoken at more than 60 workshops plus regional and national conventions.
Barchers was Managing Editor for more than four years at Weekly Reader in Stamford, CT, and she then served as Editor in Chief and Vice President at LeapFrog for more than three years. Barchers currently serves as president on the board of directors for the Association of Educational Publishers and on the PBS Media Advisory Board for the next generation of children’s programming. She consults and writes from her home in Stanford, CA.
