The Coping Series is the recipient of the Mom’s Choice Award

All Kinds of Writing

Jeanne Gehret has always been a writer and loves doing new things. In her first career as a teacher and youth minister, she created considerable curriculum and activities for her students. After a stint doing public relations for civil engineers, she discovered that her heart was not in building roads, bridges, or sewers. So when Rochester Institute of Technology recruited her to launch a new publication for high school students, she jumped at the chance and enjoyed the work very much.

By the time her children Dan and Beth arrived, she wanted more time at home with them and founded a freelance writing and public relations business;  magazines for young people, schools, and museums became her clients. But, she says, “part of me longed to sink my teeth into a challenging book project.”

In 1988, she and her husband found much-needed help for their young son from parent support groups on learning disabilities (LD). To give something back to them, she researched and wrote a feature magazine story on that topic. “When I discovered that 1.3 million other families had kids with LD, I realized that my challenging book project had presented itself.”

Launching a Publishing Company

In 1990 Ms. Gehret wrote The Don't-Give-Up Kid and Learning Disabilities, but was dismayed to hear a major children’s publisher say, “We love your book but don’t believe there are enough learning disabled children in the U.S. to read it.” She decided to prove the large publisher wrong and founded Verbal Images Press.

She and husband were not sure they could afford this new venture, but parent groups, teachers, librarians, and media got behind it. She was thrilled when the Library of Congress actually created a new classification for her book. “Every week,” she recalls, “ I put new stars on a map of the US showing states where my book had sold. We reprinted time and time again.”

In 1991, Eagle Eyes: A Child’s Guide to Attention Deficit Disorder, followed. (“When it was published, many people still thought ADD was a mathematical operation,” says Ms. Gehret.) 1992 brought forth I’m Somebody Too (now out of print), which is perhaps the only children’s novel about codependence. First Star I See (Verbal Images Press, 1997, by Jaye Andras Caffrey, also out of print) was one of the first books on girls with ADD.

Ms. Gehret took a break from these topics in 1994 to indulge her longtime interest in history. Fascinated to discover that Susan B. Anthony had lived only 10 miles away, Ms. Gehret became a tour guide at the reformer’s house and eventually wrote a biography of her. For many years, the author has portrayed Ms. Anthony in costume at schools and community events. Her biography of the suffragist is in 100 classroom libraries in the Rochester City School District.

In the fall of 2009, Verbal Images Press released major updates (4^th editions) of its classics, The Don't-give-up Kid and Eagle Eyes, with new text and illustrations. To give readers something more of Ben from Eagle Eyes, Ms. Gehret wrote a new book, Houdini’s Gift, on using reward charts with memory-challenged kids.

Besides making author visits to schools and libraries, Ms. Gehret continues to publish articles on her many interests in magazines.