Sidd Raichel

I have been working with children since the age of fifteen when I served as a counselor at Camp Omega in the Catskill Mountains of New York State. I have been writing ever since my daughter told me that the retelling of a bedtime story was incorrect; a bedtime story, mind you, that I had created. Affronted, she narrated and I wrote.

My first book, A Vilner, a Partisan, is based on ten hours of audio tape interviews with my father. He finally agreed to share his horrors of the Holocaust. The memoir was published in 2009. Currently, I am sending out an autobiographical fantasy trilogy for middle grades, hoping to find the "right" publishing house.

When not writing, I teach fifth graders in a rural public school setting. I teach how to write and read, and perhaps see the world with new eyes.

In the early hours of the day, before the awakening of the world, I sit. I write and I do not write. Worlds open up in that stillness. Behind the darkness of closed eyes, I see….