Who Wrote That? Meet Teri Sloat

Teri Sloat remembers being painfully shy. Books were her escape. She physically shielded herself with them so she wouldn’t be required to converse with people, but she also found salvation in them. Through books she found kindred spirits who were shy and didn’t fit in. “Every night at 7:30 my mother would read to me,” Sloat says. Kids in her Oregon neighborhood joined the story times because their own parents didn’t read to them. “After the stories the kids would go home and I would go to bed.” She remembers thinking she was lucky she owned so many books and only later learned that most of them came from the library. “When we moved [my mother] out of her house at age 89, she was still reading to the last little boy in the neighborhood.” More…