About Prēlum Press
My name is B. Kay Neal, and I am a former Latin drop-out. After three years of high-school Latin, I threw in the towel…but I knew that one day I’d be back, and over the years I valued the knowledge I had gained from Latin above anything else I had studied. (I also valued the test scores I got on the ACT, the GRE, and the GMAT, as well as the high-paying editing job I landed.)
In April 2003, now a mother of four, I decided I was coming back to Latin and that this time I was going to win. I got a copy of Wheelock and started off at page one. I started studying Latin daily for 20 minutes, no more, no less.
It didn’t take long for me to jump from wanting to know Latin for my own personal satisfaction, to deciding that it was imperative that my children also have access to this wondrous body of knowledge. And pretty soon after that, I started to feel terribly sorry that only those children lucky enough to live in a school district that offered Latin or to be born to parents who knew Latin could tap into all the advantages of acquaintance with the language. So like any good citizen, I decided to write a curriculum that parents with absolutely no knowledge of foreign languages or even English grammar could use to learn Latin in manageable steps and teach it to their children along the way. I also decided to set up a company to market the curriculum.
I ratcheted up my own study of Latin and ended up auditing a Latin course and then another and then returning to school, earning a second bachelor’s degree (classics) and master’s (Latin) from the University of Illinois at Urbana.
The official launch of Prēlum Press took place in March 2010, with the release of my first book, Endings (and Middles!). I got the idea for that book when I observed my Latin 101 and 102 students struggling to keep all the forms of Latin words (the morphology) straight. It reminded me of my own earlier struggles.
The curriculum I’m writing for parents is now being tested in a pilot project at the Don Moyer Boys and Girls Club in Champaign, Illinois and also by a few parents. I hope to have it out next year.
