Glen Downey (born October 15, 1969) is a Canadian children’s author, teacher, and academic from Oakville, Ontario. His publications include more than eighty books for young people across a variety of genres that focus specifically on the development of child and adolescent literacy and numeracy. Downey is best known as the series editor of Graphic Poetry, winner of both the 2010 "Texty" Award from the Text and Academic Authors Association, and the 2011 Teachers' Choice Award for Children's Books from Learning magazine. Downey came up with the concept for Graphic Poetry as a way of making poetry engaging for twenty-first century readers. Several of Downey's books are for award-winning educational series developed by Rubicon Publishing. These include Boldprint, The 10, Boldprint Graphic Readers, and Boldprint Graphic Novels.
Downey was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and from an early age took an interest in reading. Although he was routinely encouraged by teachers to read books that would challenge him, Downey’s formative reading consisted almost exclusively of Marvel comic books, Choose Your Own Adventure novels, Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and the manuals and rulebooks of fantasy and science-fiction role-playing games, specifically Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and BattleTech.
Downey’s interest in games eventually served to direct the course of his education. He received his B.A. from McMaster University in 1991, and his M.A. a year later, writing his Masters’ Thesis on the chess problem in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. He earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Victoria in 1998, expanding on his previous graduate work in examining the development of the chess motif in the Victorian novel.
After teaching at both the Univeristy of Victoria and the University of British Columbia, where he won the Ian Fairclough Prize for Teaching in 2000, Downey left to pursue a B.Ed. in English and Mathematics Education at the University of Western Ontario’s Althouse College. While in the program, he submitted the manuscript for his first book, The Fifty Fatal Flaws of Essay Writing, which Althouse published in 2002. Since then, he has held a variety of teaching and administrative positions at public and private institutions, and has taught courses in Children’s Literature and Twenty-First Century Literacies in the graduate education program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Downey’s interest in writing for children was motivated by his own formative reading experiences. He was introduced to Rubicon by David Boyd while the two were colleagues at Appleby College. Downey’s first book for Rubicon was Games for the award-winning Boldprint series. His most prolific year to date was 2009, with 47 books published across three different series.
