Wiley Blevins, Ed.D.

Author, editor, educator, and early literacy expert Wiley Blevins, Ed. D., currently serves as an educational consultant for Benchmark Education Company. He is also Associate Publisher of Reycraft Books, with a focus on publishing titles by authors and illustrators from underrepresented communities.

As a Benchmark Education consultant, Wiley has played a major role in the development of several of the company’s acclaimed phonics programs, including the 2023 CODiE Award finalist, Benchmark Phonics, along with Benchmark Phonics Intervention and Benchmark Workshop, as well as the new solution, StartUp , BuildUp , SpiralUp Phonics. He was a program consultant on Benchmark Advance © 2022, which received “all green” evaluation ratings from EdReports in all three Gateways for Grades K-5. Wiley also helped develop Benchmark Education’s current decodable readers programs: BEC Decodables, Decodable Fluency Builders, and the latest addition to the line, Dynamite Decodables. He has shared extensively his insights on what decodable readers need to be effective for teachers, including in his white paper, “Types of Words Used in Effective Phonics Readers.” As an expert instructor for Benchmark Education’s multimedia professional learning network, Benchmark Academy, Wiley has created engaging courses for educators, rooted in phonics foundations.

Wiley’s books include the PD Essentials title, Meaningful Phonics and Word Study: Lesson Fix Ups for Impactful Teaching, written to help educators teach phonics and address common weaknesses in their curriculum and materials. For Reycraft Books, with co-author Alice Boynton, he wrote the nonfiction picture book, Dolley Madison, the White House, and the Big Tornado, which was named a 2021 Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection.

Wiley has also been featured in webinars and podcasts that focus on the Science of Reading. In these presentations, he explains how teachers can ensure that their phonics instructional materials and practices align with Science of Reading research to meet young students’ literacy needs, efficiently and effectively.

Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, and raised in West Virginia, Wiley grew up in a home without books, where illiteracy was a reality that he faced every day. Early in his career, he taught elementary school in both the United States and South America. Since then, Wiley has remained committed to helping children learn to read, seeing that ability as a gift that changes a person's life forever and can never be taken away.