Sharon Draper: Hello. I'm Sharon M Draper and I am the author of Out of My Mind. It's about a little girl named Melody. And Melody is not like most people. She can't walk, she can't talk, but she's got a photographic memory and she's absolutely brilliant. She's smarter than most of the people in her classroom, but nobody knows it. She wants a friend more than anything else in the world, but how do you do that if you can't walk and you can't talk. So, the story of how Melody makes it as one of triumph and tragedy. And the reason I wrote it is because I think that there are so many young people in the world who don't have a voice and need to have a voice and need to have someone speak for them and need to have somebody say the words that they can't say.

And I've gotten emails from kids who say, "I read this and I didn't know that they have thoughts in their heads, and thank you for letting me know so now I'll speak to kids with disabilities and not be afraid of 'em." And so I think that's real important. I'm gonna read an excerpt from chapter one. It's called Words. "I'm surrounded by thousands of words, maybe millions. Words like cathedral, mayonnaise, pomegranate, silky, terrifying, iridescent. Words have always swirled around me like snowflakes. Each one delicate and different, each one melting untouched in my hands. Deep within me worlds pile up in huge drifts, mountains of phrases, and sentences and connected ideas, clever expressions. From the time I was really little, maybe just a few months old, words were like sweet liquid gifts and I drank them like lemonade. Every word my parents spoke to me or about me I absorbed and kept and remembered. All of them. I have no idea how I untangle the complicated process of words and thought, but it happened quickly and naturally.

By the time I was two all my memories had words, all my words had meanings, but only in my head. I've never spoken one single word. I'm almost 11 years old."