Who is Sue Hepker?

Sue Hepker is an early-literacy specialist, children's author, and educator who spends her working weeks where she believes literacy really begins — on the carpet, in preschool and VPK classrooms, with two- to five-year-olds and a pile of good books.

Most recently she has brought her WordPlay Literacy Enrichment program into classrooms at Bartram Academy and Lil Voyagers Academy, visiting weekly to read, sing, play with language, and act out stories with children aged 2–5. Alongside her puppet sidekick Benji Bear, she builds each session around the themes the classroom teachers are already working on, choosing books, poems, and songs that extend the lesson rather than interrupt it.

That classroom work is the heart of what she does. Children learn new words, learn to follow and perform a story, and learn how to handle and care for a book — and teachers walk away with practical read-aloud techniques they can use long after the visit ends. Sue's guiding belief is simple: a love of books is caught, not taught.

Her early-childhood experience runs deep. She has served as an Early Literacy Consultant with Keeping the Faith for Kids, and as a writer, publisher, and librarian at the Bernice E. Lavin Early Childhood Education Center in Chicago, where she built reading collections and materials for young children. She is also Director of Corker Publishing, producing children's books, reading kits, and poetry written to be performed aloud.

Born and educated in South Africa, Sue began her literacy career there, and won the international IBBY–Asahi Reading Promotion Award for The Little Library — a multimedia publishing project that gave children and communities from many different backgrounds and languages a core curriculum built around picture books. It has since been translated into 18 African languages. She has written a number of other children’s books, and served as a book selector for READ, taking children’s books into Kiswahili, Oromo, Amharic, Luganda, Shona, and Afrikaans editions.

In Chicago she was executive director of two highly regarded early-literacy programs, Hug-a-Book and the Kohl Story Bus. She has led workshops on writing for children and on best practices in early literacy for the Erikson Institute, National Louis University, the Chicago School District, Highland Park District 112, Christopher House Head Start, Mary Crane Head Start, the Bernice E. Lavin Early Childhood Learning Center, and a number of private preschools. Her 2016 poetry book Do It Again! is the basis of the language and literacy development program she now runs in several Jacksonville preschools.

She holds an Honors degree in English Literature from the University of South Africa and a Teacher’s Licentiate in Speech and Drama from Trinity College, Dublin — a performance background that shows up in every story she tells.