Marion Blank

Dr. Marion Blank is a developmental psychologist and an internationally recognized authority on language and learning.

She holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University and has spent more than five decades with children facing autism, dyslexia, deafness, blindness, cerebral palsy, and language impairment severe enough that speech was considered out of reach. She directed the Light on Literacy Program at Columbia University's Department of Psychiatry for over three decades, has taught at Columbia and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and has published more than sixty peer-reviewed papers. She created the Preschool Language Assessment Instrument and the award-winning Sentence Master reading program.

Her argument runs against conventional reading instruction: decoding alone is not enough. Reading turns on the hundred small words that carry the grammar, and most programs walk straight past them.

Brilliance Unleashed is the account of twelve children whose prognoses ruled out the lives they went on to have.