• Who We Are
• Accreditation
• Community Partners
• Our History
• Board of Directors
• Meet the Staff
  • Overview
  • Executive Director
  • Adult Education Director
  • ESOL Director
  • Development Director
  • Outreach Director
  • Office Manager
• Annual Reports

Adult Education Program Director

Lily Contorer

Lily has seen multi-sensory language instruction work in the inner city of Chicago (her hometown) and in the deserts of Arizona.  Now that she resides in beautiful Buncombe County, she vows to do her part to spread the love of literacy throughout Western North Carolina. Lily feels incredibly fortunate to work at the Literacy Council as the Adult Education and Augustine Project Director among such inspiring students and tutors.

Lily’s career began as a teacher of deaf children. In this role, she learned the importance of early language skills as it relates to literacy.  Lily became fluent in American Sign Language in order to communicate concepts with her students and implemented Cued Speech in order to provide a visual/tactile method of understanding phonics, letter sounds, rhyming skills, and patterns of written language. Lily’s deaf students, contrary to widely held expectations, learned to read at or near grade level.

Her passion ignited, Lily branched out and taught literacy skills to children, teens and adults with dyslexia, dysgraphia, apraxia, auditory and visual processing disorders, ADD/ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Academically Gifted students and students with other learning differences. She then began to train parents, teachers and other professionals in the use of multi-sensory strategies including Orton-Gillingham, Wilson, Cued Speech and American Sign Language.

Outside of the Literacy Council, Lily enjoys spending time with family and friends, she sings in a barbershop-style show chorus, creates mixed media artwork, relishes nature walks in any kind of weather, and is a voracious reader.

 

The Book

By Fred Chappell

Poet Laureate Emeritus of North Carolina

 

It waits as patiently as a forest trail

To take you to a place you must have heard about,

Quiet and exciting, a glade to be alone in,

With those who came before.

At first the journey is one slow letter at a time,

But sooner than you thought, you clip along,

Your pace growing smarter with each step.

 

You never arrive at an end

Because you never want to,

And a thousand other trails lead off from this one path,

Mysterious, inviting, alive with shadowy light.

 

The book will go with you as far as you desire.

And if you like, I will come with you.