Tanya Wright’s scholarship focuses on literacy instruction during the early childhood and elementary years. Her work is driven by a commitment to ensuring that young children have equitable access to high quality early literacy instruction.
Wright is an author of several books for teachers and parents including: "A Parent's Guide to Reading With Your Young Child" (Scholastic), "Nurturing Knowledge: Building a Foundation for School Success by Linking Early Literacy to Math, Science, Art, and Social Studies" (Scholastic), "All About Words: Increasing Vocabulary in the Common Core" Classroom: PreK-2 (Teachers College Press), "A Teacher's Guide to Vocabulary Development Across the Day: Grades K-3" (Heinemann) and "Literacy Learning for Infants, Toddlers, & Preschoolers: Key Practices for Educators" (NAEYC). Her work has been published in journals such as American Educator, The Elementary School Journal, The Reading Teacher, Reading and Writing, Reading Research Quarterly, the Journal of Literacy Research and the Journal of Teacher Education.
Wright's work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, OpenSciEd and the CREATE for STEM institute. Wright was the winner of the International Literacy Association Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2012 and the Jerry Johns Outstanding Teacher Educator in Reading Award in 2022.
She is the lead author of the SOLID Start curriculum (Science, Oral Language, and Literacy Development from the Start of School), which is an open access science and disciplinary literacy curriculum for grades K-2. Wright currently leads the literacy integration team and is co-lead of the K-2 instructional design team for the OpenSciEd Elementary curriculum development project.