Though she’s an advertising industry veteran and, one-on-one at least, an enthusiastic self-seller, children’s author Jennifer Berne "prefers to be home writing" rather than touring to promote that writing. "A few times a year I’ll go to children’s book festivals," she says "Sometimes I’ll go to a very special school within a hundred miles of home. I do have friends who [tour for their books], but it’s just not me."

It was a surprise, then, for the native New Yorker (currently living in the Berkshires) to discover that her picture book Calvin Can’t Fly: The Story of a Bookworm Birdie, illustrated by Keith Bendis and released in September 2010 by Sterling, had made its way to a Texas county school superintendent, who read it out loud to 6,000 adults as part of his Read for a Better Life campaign, which teaches parents that reading out loud to their kids is vital to educational and emotional development.

Conroe Independent School District superintendent Don Stockton told PW via e-mail that he "immediately fell in love" with Calvin after reading it last year, for the first time, to a third grade class. He saved it for almost a year until the next Read for a Better Life assembly this past August, an annual event at which Stockton "take[s] a few minutes to read to the 6,000 employees of the Conroe ISD to model the importance of reading." Calvin was also a hit with the crowd: "As I read the book, you could hear a pin drop in the auditorium. Several times during the reading there were laughter and cheers."

The book, about a bird named Calvin who doesn’t learn to fly because he’s in the library reading books, addresses a number of topics close to Stockton’s mission as an educator: family, friendship, and the importance of learning. "I also got to talk about bullying," Stockton said, "because some starlings make fun of Calvin, which makes him feel bad." Stockton says many in the audience told him they were going out to buy the book.

Berne found out about the assembly a month and a half later, when a Google search turned up an article about it in the Houston Chronicle. She knew the book was selling well—it went into its second printing after just two months, and is going into its fourth printing now—but, like all authors, the life of her book is largely unknown to her. "It does have a secret life,” she said. “And every once in a while I get a little a little peek at it."

In fact, the same day she spoke to PW she received another pleasant surprise: a member of the School Volunteer Association of Bridgeport, Conn., wrote to inquire about getting extra copies of Calvin for its Read Aloud Day. The organization was 33 copies short of the 92 copies they needed—one for each first grade in the county (Berne is sending 20 of her own copies). Earlier this year, a friend sent her a photo, also from Connecticut, of a classroom corkboard filled with students’ drawings of Calvin. "It’s amazing to me," Berne told PW. "These things come out of nowhere. I don’t know this guy [Stockton] at all. I guess he wanted a book about reading. He wants parents to read to kids at least 30 minutes every day—he thinks it will save kids’ lives. And so do I."

Calvin is Berne’s sophomore effort. Her first, a nonfiction picture book about Jacques Cousteau called Manfish, illustrated by Eric Puybaret, was published by Chronicle in 2008. That will get a follow-up in early 2013, with a bio of Einstein called The Boy Who Rode on a Beam of Light, illustrated by Vladimir Radunsky. Berne’s next book for Sterling, due out next year, is a bedtime-for-the-animals lullaby book called Under Blankets of Stars.