Jamie West

Jamie West began her career as a teacher. Afterwards she worked for top educational publishers for more than 20 years, developing literacy programs that focused on accelerating language proficiency and content knowledge for underserved populations, emergent readers, and English learners. In 2022, Jamie founded Johnnie Max, an online early literacy and oracy program for pre-readers in PreK–K. Early on, Johnnie Max won the CODiE Award for Best PreK/Early Childhood Learning Solution. The inspiration to build Johnnie Max came while working with a researcher to develop an intervention program for preschoolers. Another came from her dad, Johnnie Max Jones, who spent years traveling and photographing the world. His photographs tell his life story. When he left his photographs to Jamie, she wanted to use them to create a new story, to combine her life’s work with his, to give children the tools and inspiration they need to create their own stories. The result is a unique program that impacts the learning trajectories of all young children and brings them access to and respect for the world and its inhabitants. Among her professional positions, Jamie worked as Senior Vice President of Product Development at Macmillan Publishing Services, North America;Editorial Director of PreK–12 Reading, Literature, and Language Arts at McGraw-Hill Education;Editorial Director at Brookes Publishing;and Executive Editor of Bilingual Programs at Pearson Education (Savvas).