About the Author Alayne Smith is a retired broadcast journalism teacher who earned M. Ed. and Ed. S. degrees in Instructional Technology from the University of Georgia. She taught broadcast journalism for fifteen years in Gwinnett County, Ga., where she developed the first broadcast journalism course at the high school level. With other Gwinnett County broadcast journalism teachers, she contributed to the development of an eight-course continuum of courses in broadcast journalism and video production. Two of Alayne's students won the 1999 Southern Regional Student Emmy Award from the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sixty of her students produced documentaries and feature stories, advancing to International Media Festivals held in New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, and Denver. Alayne served as a committee member for the International Student Media Festival from 1995 to 1998 and as a CNN Student Bureau Advisor from 1999 to 2001. While working at the Broadcast and Learning Department of Gwinnett County Public Schools, Alayne created classes, developed manuals, and designed a cluster training approach for media specialists in grades K through 8 to maximize the use of each school's broadcasting equipment. She co-taught sessions in each of the county's seventeen clusters, reaching media specialists from over ninety-six schools. Media Specialists were offered hands-on instruction to assist them with creating informative, curricula-based, and attention-getting broadcasts. Ellen and the Three Predictions, published in March 2017 by Cactus Moon Publications, is Alayne's first novel. The historical fiction novel written for young adults is set in the late 1950s and early 1960s and details the life of aspiring broadcast journalist Ellen Jones through the lens of three life predictions made by Old Luella, an Alabama soothsayer. Educating Sadie, published in August 2019, was a finalist in the 2018 William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Educating Sadie follows one woman's struggle to help another woman rise above a life of poverty and abuse in the nineteenth-century South. Amanda Oglesby is a first-year teacher who meets Sadie Wiggins, a sharecropper's wife, on the night of the first open house at her new school. Childless, Sadie is drawn to the school: she's bright and wants to learn. The relationship develops further when the new teacher invites Sadie to attend daily classes. A benevolent school board chairman, a beloved boarding house owner, a midwife, a handsome plantation owner, and a misanthrope move in the background of Educating Sadie, which gives young readers a portrait of the American South at the turn of the century. Alayne is a member of the Atlanta Writers Club, the Georgia Association for Instructional Technology, the Georgia Writers Association, the Southeastern Writers Association, and the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. She currently lives in Lawrenceville, Ga., with her husband.
