Letitia B. Burton

Letitia B. Burton believes that one of the most important things that a parent can do is read to their child for at least 30 minutes a day. It was a practice that she started with her three children after receiving this wonderful advice from the head of her daughter's elementary school. It is through sharing these stories that parents and children can together travel to new and interesting worlds and develop shared compassion for the characters. Letitia continued to read to each of her children daily until they fired her, one by one, at some point when they were in middle school.

It was a biography of Dr. Seuss that Letitia read to one of her daughters that first inspired her to become a children's author. Ted Geisel was working as a journalist in New York City during World War II. Following the War, he travelled to Germany where, to his horror, he met children who were prejudiced. He realized that the most important audience to reach in a society was not the adults he had been writing for — it was children. Letitia closed the biography and realized she too was meant to write for children. She signed up for a writing class the following week and the next year left her career at Accenture, where she had worked for two decades, to focus on writing.

"We are doing important work," she told a group of authors and publishing industry executives at the 2025 Moonbeam Awards ceremony. "We are teaching children how to navigate the inevitable ups and downs of life. We are teaching them how to be good friends."

She lives in Southport, Connecticut, with her husband, three children, their two bunnies, two chickens, parrot, and beloved yellow lab Shesky, whom she now reads to. She loves to kayak out to visit the ospreys who inspired her book Soar.