Illinois State University.
Elizabeth Marshall is Associate Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches courses on children’s literature and popular culture. Her interdisciplinary research on representations of childhood within texts for and about the child has appeared in The Lion and the Unicorn, College English, Language Arts, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is the author of Graphic Girlhoods: Visualizing Education and Violence (2018) and the co-author (with Leigh Gilmore) of Witnessing Girlhood (2019).
Marianne Martens is Associate Professor at Kent State University’s School of Information. Her research and teaching are international in scope and cover: the interconnected fields of youth services librarianship, literacy development, and children’s publishing; the multiliteracies required to interpret nonlinear, multimodal materials; and issues of digital divide and social justice in young people’s access to information. She uses co-design methodologies for reading research. Martens served as Principal Investigator for the Kent State team on the USAID Strengthening Education in North-East Nigeria States (SENSE) grant, working on supporting reading instruction in Northeast Nigeria. Martens is the author of Publishers, Readers and Digital Engagement: Participatory Forums and Young Adult Publishing (2016) and The Forever Fandom of Harry Potter: Balancing Fan Agency and Corporate Control (2019). Prior to her academic career, Martens worked in children’s publishing in New York. You can read more about her at mariannemartens.org.
Debra Mitts-Smith researches and writes about the wolf in folklore, literature, art, and science for the magazine International Wolf. Her book Picturing the Wolf in Children’s Literature was published in 2010. She has taught children’s literature, young adult literature, and storytelling at the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota, and Dominican University. She is currently working on a book about cultural history of the wolf.
Emma McGilp is a primary teacher in the Scottish Borders. She has a PhD from the University of Glasgow. Her doctoral research explored the multiliteracies learners developed when translating the verbal and the visual in international picturebooks. As a researcher she has published and presented about the potential of using multilingual picturebooks in the classroom. Research interests include literacies, translated and international children’s literature, reader response, and practitioner enquiry. Current projects include an international partnership with a school in Nepal using digital literacies and coding for a social purpose and reflecting on the affordances of technologies to support global learning and citizenship during the pandemic.
Mary Jeanette Moran is Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on children’s and adolescent literature that focus on issues of ethical and feminist theory, narrative voice, and social justice. Her publications include articles on speculative fiction, Anne of Green Gables, the Judy Bolton mystery series, and feminist emotion in middle-grade family stories. Her current project investigates the intersections between feminist ethics, particularly ethics of care, and fantasy for children and young adults. She is an active member of the Children’s Literature Association, where she has served on several committees, including the Astrid Lindgren Committee and the Grants Committee.
Claudia Nelson is Professor Emerita of English at Texas A&M University. She is author or editor of 13 books, most recently Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Literature: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals (2019, co-authored with Anne Morey). She is a past president of the Children’s Literature Association and past editor of the ChLA Quarterly; her work has been recognized with the ChLA Book Award and the ChLA Article Award, as well as with Choice Outstanding Academic Title and Highly Recommended Title designations. With Elisabeth Wesseling and Andrea Mei-Ying Wu, she is currently editing The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature and Culture.
Gretchen Papazian is a professor of English at Central Michigan University, where she teaches children’s literature, diversity literatures, and American literature. Her publications include a book chapter on Easy Readers (“Reading Reading in the Early Reader” [2017]); as well as articles on picturebooks (“Color Multiculturally” [2018] and “Colorful Feelings” [2020]) and video games (“A Possible Childhood” [2010]); and two edited essay collections (Game on, Hollywood! [with Joseph Michael Sommers] and Emotion in Texts for Children and Young Adults [with Karen Coats forthcoming]). She is also a founding member of Central Michigan University Press’s series Scholarship and Lore: Games for Learning, a publication venue for academic, peer-reviewed games for game-based learning in higher education.
Melanie Ramdarshan Bold is a senior lecturer/associate professor at the University of Glasgow, where she teaches and researches children’s and young adult (YA) literature and book culture. Her research specialism is inclusive youth literature and book culture, with a particular focus on the representation of people of color, and the experiences of authors and readers of color. Melanie has published widely on the topic, alongside numerous publications about contemporary book culture. Her book Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom, 2006–2016, was published in 2019. Melanie’s interest in youth literature and book culture extends beyond academia. She was a judge on the UKYA book prize and the Scottish Teenage Book Prize, and is on the Advisory Boards for the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) Reflecting Realities project, the Pop-up Pathways into Children’s Publishing project, and Literature Alliance Scotland, and works with a number of cultural organizations across the United Kingdom.
Rebecca Rogers is the E. Desmond Lee Professor of Tutorial Education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Her research and teaching focus on literacy studies, preparing teachers to be culturally and linguistically responsive, and critical discourse studies.
Ivy Linton Stabell is Associate Professor of English at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY, where she teaches children’s, young adult, and early American literature. Her research centers on nonfiction for and by children; her essays have appeared in Children’s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, and several books.
Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. is a poet and scholar of American poetry and children’s literature. He directs the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at San Diego State University, where he is a professor of English and comparative literature. Thomas has published numerous essays and two books, Poetry’s Playground (2007) and Strong Measures (2007). He has also co-edited two collections, Prizing Children’s Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children’s Book Awards (2016) and All-of-a-Kind: Remembering June Cummins (2020). You can find Joseph on Twitter @josephsdsu.
Doris Villarreal is an assistant professor of literacy education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. She has 13 years of bilingual elementary classroom teaching experience in urban public schools. Her experiences as a bilingual elementary teacher in Texas have led to her interests in the improvement and support of educational programs that serve students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Her research interests include hybrid language practices in linguistically and culturally diverse teaching contexts with a focus on Latinx children as well as literacy teacher education.
Elizabeth A. Wheeler is Professor of English and founding Director of the Disability Studies Minor at the University of Oregon. Her 2019 book HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth analyzes the politics of disability in public space in contemporary British and American young adult and children’s literature. Her scholarship has appeared in The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Children’s Literature Quarterly, Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century, Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities, and Constructing the (M)other: Narratives of Disability, Motherhood, and the Politics of Normal.
Vivian Yenika-Agbaw was Professor of Literature & Literacies at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses in children’s/adolescent literature in the