About Linda

Linda Katz, Master’s degree graduate of the University of Michigan, enjoyed a long career in child welfare as a clinician, administrator, child advocate, and lecturer. As a writer and trainer she developed innovations to make the child placement system better serve our most vulnerable neglected and abused children, and taught these methods nationally and internationally. Along the way she has always been a poet. She is the author of many articles in professional social service journals, as well as poems in literary magazines. After retirement she found she was missing the company of small children and was lucky enough to find a place where she could be useful at Hawthorne Elementary School. She lives with her husband in Seattle.

Rise Up! Life and Literacy in an Urban First Grade

Welcome to Room 18 and visit first grade in a school whose apt motto is Rise Up! Follow a new literacy volunteer as she learns from inner-city first graders about their joys and worries, their humor and insights, and comes to some compelling conclusions. Discover the joys and sorrows of an excellent inner-city elementary classroom and some inescapable conclusions.  

Sing Me Awake: A Chronicle of Friendship

They met as graduate students in Ann Arbor in the 1960s. Together they risked their lives in Mississippi, found career paths unimagined by their mothers, embraced the major social movements of their time, and stayed close friends, despite distances, until Donna’s death in 1980.