Emma Jean is more than a successful author of three popular children’s books. She’s also a mom and a trained counselor. But more than anything else, she’s a person who loves children and is passionate about helping them.
Ms. Jean didn’t start her career writing books for children. She began as a school counselor but quickly realized that the work was disheartening. She found herself feeling too helpless to make a difference for the children who were in need. She wondered how she could speak up for them and inspire them to find their own voices, empowering them to thrive in an oppressive world.
It was this experience that spurred Ms. Jean to begin writing. Her goal was to find a voice that spoke to children and gave them a much needed escape from the world. She hoped, in her writing, that they would find words of inspiration to take back into their lives.
After successfully publishing three children’s books, Emma Jean is ready to take her endeavor to new heights, with the hopes of enabling children even further. Today, she is taking the helm of a new initiative, I’m an Author Academy, where high school aged students will be transformed into authors.
Not Waiting for Permission to Realize Her Dreams
Ms. Jean believes in being the creator of her own success and thinks that the next generation can be similarly empowered to realize their dreams. But she also realizes that bringing a vision to fruition can take hard work and often requires dedicated mentors.
“All authors are dreamers, you have to be. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to visualize your story in your mind. That’s why the hardest step for writers is to separate from the best part of themselves,” said Emma Jean. “Writers have to stop being the dreamer who came up with the stories in the first place and become the person who will start doing the remarkably hard work of making a name for yourself and building a brand.”
Emma Jean is speaking from firsthand experience.
“Many authors, myself included, waste so much time believing that the beautiful stories they tell will be enough to get them their dream agent and a million dollars in the bank,” She said. “It’s like the author’s version of trying to win the lottery; you have to stop dreaming about getting discovered and instead start doing the uncomfortable work of putting yourself out there if you want to make it in the literary world or in any creative world for that matter.”
Helping Creative Children Create
Having been through the hardship of becoming a published author, Emma Jean aspires to help others find a path to becoming published. However, her target audience is not what you might think. Ms. Jean’s unique idea is to help children and young adults discover and harness their creativity to publish a book of their own. That is the premise behind I’m An Author Academy.
As part of the program, she has created the Childhood Creativity Guide, which can be downloaded for free. Included within are various activities for children, including writing and drawing prompts, creative cooking, storytelling, and dance activities. Her writing prompts are sprinkled throughout the other activities in the guide, with different prompts for creative writing and long-form storytelling. She hopes to give them the tools to build and hone their writing into something that can be published, stating, “Creativity can’t be taught, but it must be practiced.”
Turning Creativity to Success
Building a roadmap to success isn’t easy, but Emma Jean is helping young authors learn how to turn their creative writing endeavors into published work. Through I’m An Author Academy, Emma Jean and her team know they can support students as they realize their wildest dreams of becoming an author.
For Emma Jean, building self-confidence in children is something she has made her life’s work, and it shows. Her book, “Sleeping Beauty and the Cursed Code,” is a story of female empowerment. The plot of the story puts a much-needed twist on the classic princess tale by centering a STEM-based storyline, where the princesses must write computer code to defeat the evil fairy.
The I’m An Author Academy comes from the same desire to give students a feeling of control over the difficulties in their lives and inspire them to live their dreams, no matter what obstacles they may face. For Emma Jean, that’s the most liberating thing of all, stating, “To read is to escape. To create is to be set free.”
About Emma Jean
Emma Jean is one of America’s most popular children’s best-selling authors. She has written two bestselling books and created the I’m An Author Academy to transform students into authors. She was featured in Next On Scene Media, Indie Book Talk, and the Brainwave Podcast. For more information on her work and instructions on how to enroll in I’m An Author Academy, please visit https://4pigs2fly.com/
