Bruce A. Murray

Bruce Murray is a professor emeritus of Reading Education at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. Bruce grew up in the river city of Quincy, Illinois, where he started his education at Madison School. His first-grade teacher, Clara Meyer, taught him phonics, but phonics didn't work in the books he was given to practice reading: "See Dick run. See Jane run." He learned to read anyway, and he devoured the children's section at Quincy Public Library.

Bruce taught elementary school for 16 years in the Missouri Ozarks before making his move to academia. He studied with Steve Stahl, a phonics expert at the University of Georgia, earning his PhD in 1995. His dissertation study on teaching phoneme awareness, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, was cited by the National Reading Panel as a seminal study in this new and promising area. After a year at Marquette, Bruce went to Auburn to carry out research, teaching, and outreach in Reading Education. He directed the Reading Center at Auburn, where students work with struggling readers, including children with dyslexia.

Bruce has developed methods for teaching reading explicitly, including the letterbox lesson, but he has learned that phonics only "takes" when it works to unlock the words in the books children read. He and his wife Geri have written 29 decodable stories in the two volumes of the Geniebooks series to help children learn to read successfully. Readers are invited to google the Reading Genie website for links and lessons on learning to read.