Kari-Lynn Winters

Kari-Lynn Winters, née Moore (born 1969) is a Canadian children's author, playwright, drama educator, and literacy professor.

She taught children's literacy, literature, dance and drama education at the University of British Columbia from 2004 to 2009.

Her master's thesis "Developing an Arts-Integrated Narrative Reading Comprehension Program for Less Proficient Grade 3 and 4 Students," on exploring the efficacy of using the arts to strengthen less proficient students' reading comprehension, was selected as best Master's Thesis in Literacy in Canada, 2005.

Winters completed her PhD from the University of British Columbia in 2009 with a dissertation entitled "Authorship as Assemblage: Multimodal Literacies of Play, Literature, and Drama."

Her dramatic work included writing scripts for and performing with Vancouver's theatre-for-literacy troupes Carousel Theatre and Tickle Trunk Players.

In 2010, Winters became an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University (Ontario) and co-editor of Teaching and Learning. She advanced to associate professor in 2014, and to full professor in 2021.

Winters was born in St. Thomas, Ontario.

She holds a teaching degree from the University of Toronto, in regular and special education for children ages 3–13.

She is also a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada, where she earned a certificate in technical theatre.

From 2010 to 2012 Winters expanded her work to educational activism, from organizing an annual "Arts Matters" educational conference to raising funds for girls' education in Africa.

Proceeds from her book Gift Days are being used to support the charity Because I am a Girl, a movement to "unleash" the power of girls and women in the developing world through education and women's rights; at its book launch in November 2012, enough money was raised to send 10 girls to school in Uganda for a year.

Her advocacy for arts research and arts-based practices continued throughout the Covid pandemic, including creating a play and film for "What’s Art Got to Do With It? The role of arts and culture in a community’s survival during a global pandemic."

Winters has published numerous children's books, children's non-fiction articles, and academic articles, and has herself won multiple Excellence in Teaching awards and won the St. Catharines Arts Awards 2016 "Emerging Artist Award" and the St. Catharines Arts Educator Award in 2020.

Winters says she didn't always consider herself a writer; many of her elementary school years were spent either resisting composition or struggling to write.

Her current work explores how she came to appreciate storytelling and children's literature and eventually became a writer herself, and ways to effect a similar transformation in her students.

Winters has been featured in radio and newspaper interviews and her academic work has been cited by other literacy researchers.

By 2020 she had twenty-nine books published or press.

POETRY