C.M. Worthman is a teacher, father, writer, and champion of youthful brilliance. He has taught for thirty-five plus years at the middle grades, high school, and university levels. After getting his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago, he landed at DePaul University in Chicago, where he is a professor of Middle Grades and Secondary English Education. 

Over the years, he has developed and led community-based literacy programs, as well as taught an Inside-Out course, "Deconstructing the School to Prison Pipeline," inside Cook County Jail. He has researched and written extensively about adolescents’ in and out of school literacy experiences and has published numerous scholarly articles and one ethnography, “Just Playing the Part”: Engaging Adolescents in Drama & Literacy (Teachers College Press, 2002). He now focuses on writing middle grade and young adult novels. 

C.M. is committed to writing narratives with strong, memorable characters and smart plot lines that speak to the complexity of adolescent existence, the power of the imaginative will, and the interdependency of all life. Kid America (Mission Point Press) is only the first of more to come. You can find C.M. in Chicago in classrooms, coffee shops, bookstores, and on the lakefront, running or biking.