Ellen Mayer

Ellen Mayer is an award-winning author who writes picture books for babies and young children and the grown-ups who read to them. She has written over a dozen books for children, many of them for her Small Talk Books® series published by Star Bright Books. These lively stories of everyday family life both deliver fun for little ones and help adults build children’s early language and math skills.

Ellen has also collaborated with the renowned South African writer Sindiwe Magona on Books and Bricks: How a School Rebuilt the Community, a Bank Street Best Children’s Book. Kirkus Reviews said of her most recent picture book, Gift & Box, published by Knopf Books for Young Readers, “This story is absolutely the full package.”

Ellen has a background in early childhood education. For many years she worked as an education researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, studying how families are engaged in their children’s learning. She has also worked as an early literacy home visitor with a diverse community of young children and their parents in a Cambridge Public Schools program. Long ago she earned an M.Phil. in Sociology from Columbia University and began her work life as an applied researcher at a large social welfare agency in New York City.

When Ellen isn’t writing children’s books, you can find her reading them aloud as a volunteer visiting author in her local public schools, or with her young grandchildren who live nearby. She often collaborates with her musician husband in “Books + Banjo” reading and sing-along programs for young children. Ellen lives with him and their sweet and very swift rescue pup Ellie in Cambridge, MA.