Skagit Kids Read Week

2025 Details

• 2025’s dates are November 2-8! It all wraps up on November 8 with a special activity and Full STEAM Ahead w/ Help Me Grow Skagit Community Resource Fair!
• SKRW Facebook Event for the November 8 author event @ CMSC – be sure to click ‘interested’ or going to get reminders & updates!
• Participate in “Get Caught Reading” – share pictures and video of you, your family and friends, caught in the act of reading on the Facebook event page! Remember to tag them with #SkagitKidsReadWeek too!
• The Skagit County & City of Burlington Commissioners made a formal Skagit Kids Read Week Proclamation at their chambers! 2025 Skagit County Proclamation for SKRW.
• Events & Activities including: Book Readings, Community Events, Virtual Events, You Tube, Activities, Story Walks – TBA
  • 11/8/25: Featured event Saturday, November 8  – at the Children’s Museum of Skagit County, featuring a special ‘write and illustrate your own book’ activity.
    • SKRW featured author Jennifer Bradbury
    • Kelly Hawkins, CMSC Graphic Artist & Illustrator
• Interested in sponsoring the event and/or copies of the books for local schools and libraries? Contact us!

About the author

From jennifer-bradbury.com/about/

Jennifer Bradbury’s debut novel, Shift—which Kirkus Reviews starred, calling it “fresh, absorbing, compelling”—was picked as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and made the School Library Journal YALSA Booklist. It is also on numerous state reading lists. A former English teacher and one-day Jeopardy! champ, she lives in Burlington, Washington, with her family.

I wonder if all author bios on book jackets are as noteworthy for what they omit as mine is. The good people at Atheneum make me sound way cooler than I actually am. The bio above says nothing about my weird allergies. It also fails to mention I woke up on my 18th birthday with half my face paralyzed (I got better). Nowhere is record of the fact that I once got stuck on a giant water toy on a lake, or that I had a cast on my nose after my sister threw a baseball at me. And it certainly doesn’t indicate my habit of binge watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly or Doctor Who. There are many other details it skims over, all of which will prove invaluable for those of you writing book reports or simply curious enough to visit this page to find out more.

Jennifer Bradbury’s debut novel, Shift
Shift is my first published novel, but it’s actually the third novel I tried to write. And yeah, Shift is pretty good. A lot of people like it. And I’m very, very grateful.

A former English teacher
I was an English teacher. I know how unutterably fascinating this makes me. At Burlington-Edison High School I fell in love with YA literature, and even shared my early efforts with my ninth grade writing classes. Shift was actually workshopped in draft form by two groups of ninth grade students—the boys in one class were very disappointed that I was unable to order the cover designer to put a “hot girl on a bike” on the cover. They didn’t care that no hot girls actually rode bikes in the book.

I left teaching when my kids were very young, though now that they are not-so-young, I’ve gone back to teaching part time. My school is on a block schedule, which means I work every other day with the coolest, weirdest high school students where I teach Honors English to tenth graders and a Podcasting class to 11/12 graders. On my days away from school, I work on my writing, exercise, walk my dog and try not to grade too many papers.

A one-day Jeopardy! champ
I was on Jeopardy! It was many years ago, but still seems to be the thing my friends and family most enjoy sharing about me. It’s a little weird to be celebrated for my ability to recall trivia, but it was a fun ride. I did win one day, but got destroyed the next show by a woman who described herself as “part Klingon, part Corleone.” And I really embarrassed myself by missing a question about Voltaire even though one of my classes was studying him at the time. The day after it aired, the first thing my students said was, “I had no idea you had such big lips.” I don’t wear a lot of makeup in real life, so it was a bit of a shock for many in the audience. They do say the camera adds ten pounds . . .

Lives in Burlington, Washington with her family
I haven’t always lived in the Evergreen state, but it definitely has become home. I grew up in Owensboro, Kentucky. If you email my sister, she can tell you all the famous people from there, even though she won’t include me on the list. I attended college at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, and spent a semester abroad at Cambridge University in England. During college and a bit after, I worked summers at Camp Rockmont in North Carolina. Even though it was a boys’ camp, they hired a few women every year to keep the place civil. I was on the adventure team working as a guide for rock climbing and backpacking trips, as well as food prep for large-scale campouts. Before you start thinking again that I’m cool, I got lost a lot in the woods and didn’t know how to climb when I was hired. I was, however, something of a prodigy at making grits for 120 people at once.

In 2005, we lived in India. I participated in a Fulbright Teaching Exchange, teaching at Bhavan Vidyalya in Chandigarh, a few hours north of Delhi. I wrote what would become the first draft of Shift while on that exchange, and my experiences there and exposure to so many individuals who had live through the partition of India inspired A Moment Comes, which was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, a Junior Library Guild Selection, A Kirkus Best Book of the Year, and winner of the South Asia Book Award.

My most recent book returns to one of my favorite settings–Mammoth Cave. Settings are the starting places for all my stories, and I’m so happy to have finally written a story set in my home state.