Lea Shaver

One important theme in ENDING BOOK HUNGER is the special challenges facing children from disadvantaged language communities.

I know how difficult it is to go to school in a language that is not your own; to try to learn to read in a language you barely understand. I've lived that experience.

When my dad was stationed in West Germany with the Air Force, my parents sent me to first grade in German public schools.

One day the teacher read us a story while we painted. The next day, she hung up twenty paintings of Struwwelpeter, a scary troll with wiry hair and long claws. And mine: a mermaid.

I just had no clue what was going on. All the time. I would show up to school on days there was no school, because no one in my family understood the notes sent home.

I got terrible grades in reading and spelling all that year. My only passing subject was math. Fortunately my mother was a kindergarten teacher, so she taught me to read at home.

Much later in life, I also spent a summer in Tunisia, studying Arabic. I was effectively illiterate in that language. Transportation, shopping, everything was a huge struggle.

I bought an Arabic translation of The Little Prince, hoping to develop my reading skills. I spent an hour looking up each word on the first page in my dictionary... but the story still made no sense.

Eventually I realized my problem: I was actually trying to read the last page! In Arabic, books are read from right-to-left, and what to English readers feels like back-to-front.

At the end of of two months' grueling studies, I had a huge victory. I spoke enough Arabic to convince a postal officer to release my package to me without identification.

The newest Harry Potter book was in that package. So my motivation was really high!

Although the experiences haven't always been easy, I love languages. In addition to Arabic and German, I've also studied Italian, Zulu, and Yucatec Maya. I'm fluent in Spanish.

My time overseas also taught me not to take education for granted.

After law school, I practiced as a human rights lawyer. The most important case I ever worked on dealt with the right to education in South Africa.

Millions of children were being pushed out of state-subsidized schools failure to pay school fees. Legally the fees were supposed to be waived for poor families, but it wasn’t happening.

We sued a school where the principal was withholding diplomas, publicly shaming students, and simply telling kids not to come back.

The law was on the children’s side, and eventually the school leadership conceded the case. It made national headlines.

That line of litigation continued after I left and had enormous impact. Today, almost every South African child is in school.

When I decided to become a professor, I started in a tenure-track position at Hofstra University on Long Island. But then we had a kid, and we wanted to be closer to family.

I was incredibly fortunate to be able to move to the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in 2012. Indianapolis is my husband's home town, and I'm an adopted Hoosier.

We are parents three times over now, with little girls ages 4, 6, and 10. I feel really heavily the responsibility for their formation as emerging book lovers. We read together almost every day.

It’s a really fantastic perk of being a parent, having an excuse to spend hours reading children’s literature! It gives me a very personal connection to this topic.