Kalli Dakos was interviewed for BookCast by Fairfax County Public Library Director Sam Clay. BookCast is sponsored by Virginia Commerce Bank through the Fairfax Library Foundation.

• Kalli Dakos, a former Fairfax County Public School teacher, is the author (with her daughter, Alicia DesMarteau) of Our Principal Promised to Kiss a Pig, about a pig named Hamlet who speaks in Shakespearean verse. Her other collections of children's poems include: If You're Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand; Don't Read This Book Whatever You Do!; Mrs. Cole on an Onion Roll; and The Goof Who Invented Homework. Dakos has written more than 2,000 poems about life in elementary school classrooms.
  
  
• She has also taught in the Canadian Arctic and the Province of Ontario, as well as Nevada and New York.



• Kalli took a break from teaching, studied journalism at Syracuse University, and became a freelance magazine and newspaper writer.



• She now travels the country giving a workshop called "A Celebration of Life in the Classroom," which encourages literacy through poetry and play. She uses toys and props in her presentations. She has a little toilet that flushes, which she uses with her bathroom poems. A child is picked from the audience to plunge the toilet. "The children are pulled into the poem through play," she says.