Last week, we welcomed a new team member at Book Harvest: Wilmarie Cintron-Tyson, our new Early Childhood Services Navigator. Wilma will be working with our Book Babies team, accompanying families as they navigate childcare, pre-k, and kindergarten, helping them access resources and make successful transitions.
Originally from Puerto Rico, Wilma came to the United States when she was eight years old. She grew up in the Triangle before going to Fordham University in New York and then New Orleans, where she taught kindergarten for three years. She moved back to Durham because it was important to both her and her husband to be close to their families, especially now that baby Isabel joined their family just four months ago.
Wilma is excited to join the Book Harvest team because a passion for early childhood literacy has been a thread through all of her work. “Building a love of learning comes from a love of reading,” she explains, and she is excited to connect with and support families as their children grow in that love. She knows from her experience as a kindergarten teacher that contact between parents and teachers often drops off over the course of the year, and she’s thrilled to be able to use what she learned from that experience as a teacher to help bridge the divide between teachers and parents of our youngest students.
Wilma has lots of connections to Book Harvest — most notably, two members of our Authors’ Circle: Mike Wiley, and Wilma’s father-in-law, Tim Tyson. In fact, she shares a passion for theater with Mike, and she was part of the Women’s Theater Festival in Raleigh this summer, participating in workshops, staged readings, and full plays.
Wilma was also excited to learn that Book Harvest participates in Read for the Record every year, as she worked with Jumpstart for four years as part of their college corps. She used their book-centered curriculum in preschool classrooms, getting kids to read with each other in groups of three and coordinating breakout activities related to the stories.
Please join us in welcoming Wilma to our team! You can contact her at wilmarie@bookharvestnc.org.