Katie Garner, M.Ed.,(author of the SECRET STORIES®) is an internationally known speaker, author and literacy consultant with twenty five years combined classroom experience and a passion for infusing neuroscience into literacy learning. Her "backdoor-to-the-brain" approach to phonemic skill mastery via the affective learning domain shifts the paradigms associated with early literacy skill instruction, gaining national recognition with the No Child Left Behind, Reading First, and RTI Initiatives. As a featured and keynote speaker at literacy and educational conferences across the United States and abroad—including an ongoing keynote series at the Vulnerable Readers Summits with North American literacy leaders, Dr. Richard Allington  (What Really Matters for Struggling Readers) and Dr. Anne Cunningham (The National Early Literacy Panel “NELP” Report)— Katie shares game-changing strategies for boosting existing phonics instruction with the latest neural research showing how our brains learn best. Her practical and proven methods for bringing neuroscience into the forefront of literacy learning have been shared in both lecture and panel discussions at Harvard University and MIT as part of the Learning and the Brain Conference and Research Consortium and are the subject of an upcoming professional development book series.