Deborah Appleman

Hollis L. Caswell Professor, Carleton College

Deborah Appleman is the Hollis L. Caswell Professor of educational studies and director of The Summer Writing Program at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She has been a visiting professor at Syracuse University and at the University of California-Berkeley. Prior to earning her doctorate at the University of Minnesota in 1986, she was a high school English teacher for 9 years, working in both urban and suburban schools. She continues to work regularly in high school English classrooms with students and teachers across the country.

Professor Appleman’s primary research interests include adolescent response to literature, multicultural literature, adolescent response to poetry, and the teaching of literary theory at the secondary level. She is the author of many articles and book chapters and, with an editorial board of classroom teachers, helped create the multicultural anthology Braided Lives. In addition to the Third Edition of Critical Encounters in Secondary English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents, her books include Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of Reading, Reading for Themselves: How to Transform Adolescents into Lifelong Readers Through Out-of-Class Book Clubs, Teaching Literature to Adolescents with Richard Beach, Susan Hynds, and Jeffrey Wilhelm, Reading Better, Reading Smarter with Michael Graves, and her most recent book with Michael Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm, Uncommon Core: Where the Authors of the Standards Go Wrong About Instruction and How You Can Get It Right.

Professor Appleman’s recent work has focused on education and the incarcerated. She teaches literature and creative writing classes regularly at a high security men’s prison in Minnesota. The work of her incarcerated students can be found in the creative writing anthology, From the Inside Out: Letters to Young Men and Other Writing.