Martha visits elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. She's happy to tailor a presentation to your students. All of her presentations include games, giveaways, and lots of laughter. 

  • A full-day visit is $2,400. Four presentations fit into this schedule.

  • For visits where travel is required, the same fees plus travel expenses apply.

  • Zoom visits are also available. These start at $250.

Martha works with Ellen Shay at School Visit Dot Connector to book visits. Please reach out to Ellen today! (School Visit Dot Connector)

If an in-person visit doesn’t fit your budget, Martha can do Author in Residence programs—a whole week’s worth of fun and learning:

Martha is offering a Virtual Writer In Residence Package tailored to a variety of age and interest levels. You can choose what suits you best and use the materials at a time that fits your schedule and your students’ needs.

Each package costs $1,500.

For elementary and middle school: HOW AN IDEA BECOMES A STORY

This: five-lesson series includes you a week’s worth of thirty-minute sessions to enrich your school day and enliven your curriculum.

Martha will focus here on the brand-new picture book This Old Dog, which received a starred review from Booklist, who called it “an uplifting and emotional punch.”  

You’ll get exclusive videos that you can play for your students at your convenience, as well as a live, 20-minute Q&A session with Martha at the end of the week (and if we need more time, as often happens, that’s possible at no extra charge).

  • Day 1: How an idea becomes a story, and how a story becomes a book, with readings of This Old Dog. This shows kids a glimpse into the life of a writer and her pets (consistently the most popular part of any presentation).

  • Day 2: How to build a story around a character (geared toward elementary school students). (20 minutes). This teaches kids how to identify, create, and sharpen characters, helping them understand a fundamental aspect of story and the importance of representation in narrative.

  • Day 3: Voice! The words you pick make your character come alive (20 minutes). In this episode, Martha talks about syllables and how you can create different feelings with words of different lengths. It’s great for kids learning syllabification and for more advanced writers.  

  • Day 4: Five writing prompts that highlight research, curiosity, and the imagination. This lesson will teach kids to follow their instincts, reinforcing principles of independent study and lifelong learning.

  • Day 5: Finishing your story. How do story endings and beginnings relate? This is the secret to finishing what you start.

For middle school and high school: THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE (a look at nonfiction)

A former journalist and high school teacher, Martha Brockenbrough has written nonfiction for decades, including an online humor column for the encyclopedia Encarta, as well as books about Bigfoot, Sharks, Alexander Hamilton, Donald Trump, and artificial intelligence.

The focus here is on how verifiable facts make for fascinating subject matter and can be found using many sources. We live in a time where this critical set of skills is perhaps more important than it’s ever been and Martha loves nothing more than conveying her excitement about how to find great stuff.

You’ll get exclusive videos that you can play for your students at your convenience, as well as live, 30-minute Q&A sessions with Martha at the end of the week (and if we need more time, as often happens, that’s possible at no extra charge).

-       Day 1: An overview of the writer’s life: how I choose a topic, and how nonfiction becomes a book (with examples from Finding Bigfoot, Shark Week, Hamilton, and Unpresidented). 

-       Day 2: What good research looks like: How to tell a quality source from a suspect one, how to interact with librarians to get what you need, how to keep track of everything you learn.

-       Day 3: Getting creative with research (sources you haven’t thought of): There’s more to research than books. Video, music, old advertisements, photo archives, NASA moon phases, weather reports—Martha shows students how to use all of these to create scenes that come to life.

-       Day 4: How to start your curiosity engines and ask all the right questions. Understanding something new depends on breaking things down into questions. Using FINDING BIGFOOT as example of a book that was driven by questions, Martha will show students how they can break down a big topic, organize research, and become authors themselves. It’s great reinforcement for research papers and practices, linking academic work to real-world enterprises.

-       Day 5: Brief reading and Q&A with Martha Brockenbrough. Up to three thirty-minute sessions with different groups.

For middle school and high school: TURN YOUR LIFE INTO STORY: Young Adult Fiction

What do you love? What do you know to be true? This is how authors such as Martha Brockenbrough come up with ideas for novels that are original, layered, and resonant. The emphasis with this week is giving students the tools to see the narrative arcs of their own lives, which is a great complement to writing they do in the classroom and in such things as applications.

You’ll get exclusive videos that you can play for your students at your convenience, as well as a live, 20-minute Q&A session with Martha at the end of the week (and if we need more time, as often happens, that’s possible at no extra charge).

-       Day 1: An overview of how people become writers, and what it looks like as a career, along with the background of how I came to write The Game of Love and Death, a novel set in 1930s Seattle, featuring art and music that changed my life when I was 16.

-       Day 2: How to build a story around character. In academic terms, understanding character involves creating protagonists, antagonists, and secondary characters and their changes over the course of a story. In this session, Martha talks about what a character wants, what a character believes, and how those things become the engine of a story’s plot. This gives students powerful ways of analyzing literature and understanding theme on a deep and authentic level, making it both an academic and practical lesson.

-       Day 3: Scenes are the building blocks of story. In this session, we examine how to create great ones using setting, sensory information, character, conflict, and dialogue.

-       Day 4: Revision and how to make your first attempts great. Professional writers know that excellence happens in revision, something students often resist. In this session, Martha shows how to transform scenes and sentences so they sizzle.

-       Day 5: Q&A with Martha Brockenbrough: Up to three three thirty-minute sessions with different groups.