Nancie Atwell teaches seventh-and eighth-grade writing, reading, and history at the Center for Teaching and Learning, a K-8 demonstration school she founded in Edgecomb, Maine, in 1990. Nancie was the first classroom teacher to receive the NCTE David H. Russell Award and the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize for distinguished research in the teaching of English. In 2003, she was named the NCTE Middle School English Teacher of the Year.

She is the author/editor of nine other books published by Heinemann, including In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing, Reading, and Learning. Second Edition (1998); Side by Side: Essays on Teaching to Learn (1991); Coming to Know: Writing to Learn in the Intermediate Grades (1990); and the first three volumes in Heinemann's Workshop series (1989, 1990, 1991). She also conducts highly popular workshops for teachers.

In 2002, Nancie's Lessons That Change Writers was published by firsthand, an imprint of Heinemann.