Educator Innovator

Sonya Huber is the author of seven books, including the new guide, Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto, and the award-winning essay collection on chronic pain, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. Her other books include Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir in a Day, Opa Nobody, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, and The Backwards Research Guide for Writers. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and other outlets. She teaches at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield low-residency MFA program. Michelle Caruso Walker has been working in education for the last 20 years. She’s taught middle school and high school in both CT and NY. Michelle has a PhD from Fordham University and currently works in Westport Public Schools as the middle school instructional coach. She’s also the mom to three boys!

All of us in education can find opportunities to interrupt the status quo that allows inequities to go unchallenged. In Teaching for Racial Equity: Becoming Interrupters, authors Tonya Perry, Steven Zemelman, and Katy Smith show us the way. In this episode of The Write Time, listen to the authors talk about the making and use of this professional text. Tonya B. Perry is the director of the Red Mountain Writing Project in Birmingham, Alabama. She also is the vice provost of Miles College, a Historically Black College, and a co-author of Teaching for Racial Equity: Becoming Interrupters. She is the vice-president of NCTE. Her favorite pastime is writing and spending time with family and friends. Katy Smith is the Chair of the Department of Educational Inquiry and Curriculum Studies and the Director of Graduate Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. She began her association with the Illinois Writing Project (IWP) as a teacher-consultant while she was teaching high school students, and now dir

Rose Brock, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Library Science at Sam Houston State University, is a veteran educator and advocate for using audiobooks as a tool for literacy and is the cofounder of the national literacy initiative Guys Listen, a part of the Guys Read literacy national program. Dr. Brock was awarded the Siddie Joe Johnson Award for Outstanding Service to Youth by the Texas Library Association and is cofounder of NTTBF, the North Texas Teen Book Festival. She is the editor of Hope Wins, Hope Nation: Young Adult Authors Share Personal Moments of Inspiration, and author of Young Adult Literature in Action: A Librarian’s Guide. James Ponti is the New York Times bestselling author of three middle-grade book series: City Spies, about an unlikely squad of five kids from around the world who form an elite MI6 spy team; the Edgar Award-winning FRAMED! Series, about a pair of tweens who solve mysteries in Washington, DC; and the Dead City trilogy, about a secret society that polices the

Dr. Yohuru Williams is a distinguished University Chair, Professor of History, and the founding Director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas. He received his Ph.D. from Howard University in 1998 and is the author and editor of several books including Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement and Black Power/White Politics: Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Panthers in New Haven. Dr. Williams has appeared on a variety of local and national radio and television programs, most notably CNN, BET, History Channel, Huff Post, Matter of Fact Listening Tour with Soledad O’Brien, and NPR. His scholarly articles have appeared in the American Bar Association’s Insights on Law and Society, The Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, The Black Scholar, and The Journal of Black Studies. Joe Anson has been working in education since 2000. After spending 18+ years in the throes of junior-high language arts in Spanish Fork, Utah, he now works in teacher education at Bellevue Unive

Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Mayra Cuevas is the author of the teen novels Does My Body Offend You? and Salty, Bitter, Sweet. Her short story Resilient was published as part of the anthology FORESHADOW. Mayra is an award-winning producer for CNN and co-founder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival. She keeps her sanity by practicing Buddhist meditation. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, her two stepsons, their fluffy cat and a very loud Chihuahua. Marie Marquardt is author of YA novels Does My Body Offend You? (with Mayra Cuevas), Dream Things True, The Radius of Us, and Flight Season. Her books have earned many awards and commendations, including BEA Buzz Books, Books all Young Georgians Should Read, and the CLASP Américas Commendation, and they have been shortlisted for several state book awards, including the South Carolina Young Adult Book Award and the Missouri Gateway Readers Award. Marie also has published articles and co-authored two non-fiction books about Latin American immigration to the U.S.

Gordon Korman introduces himself as a regular guy who just happened to write 100 books for kids and adolescent readers. Born in Montreal in October of 1963, his writing career began in the seventh grade when he took English with his track coach. Then, he was challenged to write every day for more than four months and he finished his first novel, This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall! With his mother as his typist, he sent it to Scholastic and just like that, Korman was published as a freshman in high school. That was just the beginning. He has sold well over 30 million copies of his books, many translated in over 30 languages. Currently, Gordon lives in Long Island outside of NYC where he continues to love visiting school, teachers, and driving his own children to wherever they need to be. His new book, The Fort, about a group of kids who stumble on an abandoned Cold-War-era bomb shelter, was released in summer 2022. Allison Fallon is an eighth-grade teacher and Department Head at Central Middle School

Gilly Segal grew up in Florida, and graduated from Hebrew University, and finally decided to call Decatur, Georgia home. By day, she’s the chief legal officer of an advertising agency. By night, she is a caped crusader! No, just kidding (she wishes). Her real not-so-secret identity is author. She’s been writing in one form or another since she wrote her first young adult novel–a Sunfire YA romance fanfic–typed out on an electric typewriter. Although she will confess it was titled CLAUDIA, she will neither confirm nor deny that any copies still exist. Whatever you do, don’t ask her mom if it’s in those boxes stored in the closet of her childhood room. Kimberly Jones is an American author and filmmaker, known for the New York Times bestselling young adult novel, I’m Not Dying With You Tonight and for the viral video “How Can We Win” published during the George Floyd protest. The book, co-authored with Gilly Segal, was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in 2020. That same year, a seven-minute video featuring K

Rachel Ignotofsky is a New York Times Best Selling author and illustrator, based in Santa Barbara. She grew up in New Jersey on a healthy diet of cartoons and pudding and graduated from Tyler School of Art in 2011. Her work is inspired by history and science. She believes that illustration is a powerful tool that can make learning exciting. She has a passion for taking dense information and making it fun and accessible. Rachel hopes to use her work to spread her message about scientific literacy and feminism. Bryan Ripley Crandall has an interesting story with technology, as he remembers vividly the envy he felt when his best friend, Peter Boy, got the first home computer of the neighborhood and, later, when his college classmates came to campus with clunky, but helpful, keyboard machines. He taught for over a decade in Louisville, Kentucky, and became part of the 21st cohort of the Louisville Writing Project. It was then he began thinking about the ways technology was shifting his own classroom instruction.

Join NWP Radio for a visit with author and NWP Writers Council member Pornsak Pichetshote. Pichetshote was a Thai-American rising star editor at DC’s Vertigo imprint where he worked on such comics perennials as The Sandman and Swamp Thing. His books have been nominated for dozens of Eisner awards—be it the award-winning Daytripper, the New York Times bestseller The Unwritten, or critical darlings like Sweet Tooth and Unknown Soldier. He left Vertigo to become an executive in DC Entertainment’s media team, where he started and oversaw DC TV’s department. He is the author of Infidel, his first major comics work as a writer, and his newest series The Good Asian which features police detective Edison Hark.

Join us for this episode of NWP Radio in which we will talk to Peter Docker, former member of the Royal Air Force, about his new book Leading from the Jumpseat.

Join us for this episode of NWP Radio in which we talk to Susie Wise about her new book Design for Belonging, a Stanford d.school guide. In her book, Susie talks about what it means to belong and some of the contexts, or moments, that can be designed using particular levers like space, role, ritual, and groupings. The Design for Belonging website also includes toolkits and resources to get started, wherever you are.

This summer, teachers are invited to join together with scholars, artists, and authors to strengthen writing and multimodal composing practices in a virtual, open institute co-sponsored by three MIchigan Writing Project sites. This NWP Radio show invited facilitators to describe how they will support participants in coming together to create brave spaces in writing instruction that centers writing and composing models at the intersections of queer, BIPOC, and feminist voices; that center intersectionality; and develop a community of folx to support these efforts and to stay committed with and alongside each other. Join us for this interview to learn more and find out how to get involved; registration is open until June 15, 2022. About Our Guests Rae Oviatt, Ph.D., has nearly two decades of experience in education, community organizing, and research. She was a middle and high school English teacher and teacher of multilingual and bilingual English language learners across urban contexts in Atlanta, Bangkok, I

Interested in what writing looks and feels like outside of school in those professions that depend on writing like marketing or public relations? Join us for this conversation about writing in the work-a-day worlds marketing and business with Jim Rowe, author of Get Your Ducks in a Rowe. Rowe, who has worked, coached, and supported writers in these fields talks about what kind of support writers need when their goals are clarity and brevity.

Sarah J. Donovan, PhD, is a former junior English language arts teacher of fifteen years and an Assistant Professor of Secondary English Education at Oklahoma State University. She wrote Genocide Literature in Middle and Secondary Classrooms (2016) and the young adult novel, Alone Together (2018). Dr. Donovan was the Books in Review columnist for The ALAN Review (2019) and served as a state representative and board member for The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of NCTE (ALAN). She hosts a weekly blog, Ethical ELA, and has contributed chapters to The Best Lesson Series (Talks with Teachers, 2018), Queer Adolescent Literature as a Complement to the English Language Arts Curriculum (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Moving Beyond Personal Loss to Societal Grieving (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Contending with Gun Violence in the English Language Classroom (Routledge, 2019). Kristin Bartley Lenz is a writer and social worker who has lived in Michigan, Georgia, and California. Her debut young adult novel, T

Natasha Bowen is a writer, a teacher, and a mother of three children. She is of Nigerian and Welsh descent and lives in Cambridge, England, where she grew up. Natasha studied English and creative writing at Bath Spa University before moving to East London, where she taught for nearly ten years. Her debut book Skin of the Sea was inspired by her passion for mermaids and African history. She is obsessed with Japanese and German stationery and spends stupid amounts on notebooks, which she then features on her secret Instagram. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, watched over carefully by Milk and Honey, her cat and dog. Stephanie Renee Toliver is an assistant professor of Literacy and Secondary Humanities at the University of Colorado, Boulder whose scholarship centers the freedom dreams of Black youth and honors the historical legacy that Black imaginations have had and will have on activism and social change. She is the author of Recovering Black Storytelling in Qualitative Research: Endarkened Storywork.

Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, educator, and community activist. Her young adult novel, Piecing Me Together (Bloomsbury, 2017) received a Coretta Scott King Award and Newbery Honor. Her children's picture books and novels for teens have received several awards and international recognition. Her poetry and fiction centers around the experiences of Black girls and women, and explores themes of home, identity, and the intersections of race, class, and gender. One of Renée’s passions is using the arts to help youth cope with trauma and discuss social issues. Her picture book, A Place Where Hurricanes Happen is based on poetry workshops she facilitated with children in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Fredeisha Harper Darrington is an educator with the Fairfield City School System in Fairfield, Alabama and works as a teacher-consultant with the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Red Mountain Writing Project. She is passionate about social justice as it relates to the educ

For over twenty years, Peter Kahn has been fortunate to employ the power of poetry to help give voice to those previously unheard. He has been a high school teacher at Oak Park/River Forest High School in Chicago since 1994 and has recently also taught at Roosevelt University. Peter was commended in the National Poetry Competition 2009 and 2017. His new book, Respect The Mic, is an expansive, moving poetry anthology representing 20 years of poetry from students and alumni of Chicago’s Oak Park River Forest High School Spoken Word Club. Natalie Rose Richardson was born in New York City to a long line of border-crossers and proud people of blended heritage. Natalie is a graduate of the University of Chicago (BA), and the Litowitz Creative Writing Program (in poetry) at Northwestern University. She is a current non-fiction MFA candidate at NYU. Rich Robbins is a rapper, songwriter, producer, and educator. But more than anything, the Oak Park-born, Chicago-based artist is a world-builder. Rich’s early years as

In this conversation with Rebecca Harper, director of the Augusta University Writing Project and author of Write Now & Write On: 37 Strategies for Authentic Daily Writing in Every Content Area, we will discuss writing instruction, daily writing, writing across the curriculum, and her upcoming Deeper Dive in the Write Now Teacher Studio.

Former teacher Laura Purdie Salas believes reading small picture books and poems can have a huge impact on your life. She has written more than 130 books for kids, including Lion of the Sky: Haiku for All Seasons (Kirkus Best Books and Parents Magazine Best Books of the Year), the Can Be… series (Bank Street Best Books, IRA Teachers’ Choice), and Bookspeak!: Poems About Books (Minnesota Book Award, NCTE Notable). Laura shares inspiration and practical tips with educators about poetry, nonfiction, and more. Lisa Lapina is currently teaching first grade in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She attended Bloomsburg University where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood and Elementary Education in 2011. Following BU, Lisa attended the University of Pennsylvania graduating in 2013 with a master’s degree in Reading, Writing, and Literacy. She moved to Maryland in 2013 and taught first grade for five years. She moved back to Pennsylvania in 2018 and taught first grade in Upper Darby, PA before moving to The Sc

Tiffany D. Jackson is the New York Times Bestselling author of YA novels including the Coretta Scott King— John Steptoe New Talent Award-winning Monday’s Not Coming, the NAACP Image Award-nominated Allegedly, Let Me Hear A Rhyme, Grown, and her latest titles Blackout, White Smoke, and Santa in the City. She received her bachelor of arts in film from Howard University, her master of arts in media studies from the New School, and has over a decade in TV/Film experience. The Brooklyn native is a lover of naps, cookie dough, and beaches, currently residing in the borough she loves, most likely multitasking. Dr. Delicia Greene is an assistant professor in the Department of Literacy Teaching and Learning in the School of Education at the University at Albany, SUNY. She also holds an affiliate appointment in the Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. Her work enhances teaching and learning in the urban secondary literacy contexts. Dr. Greene’s research is at the inters