Welcome!
The 2019 Summit on Teaching YA Literature
May 29-30, 2019
UNLV Lied Library
All meetings will be in the Lied Library
Time on both days: 7:30 to 4:20 (including lunch)
Sponsored by:
The UNLV College of Education, The Depart. of Teaching & Learning, and Clark County School District
Register Here
Meg Medina Current Winner of the 2019 Newbery Award
Padma Venkatraman
Phil Bildner
Featured Presenters
Steven T. Bickmore is an associate professor of in English Education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He taught high school English in Salt Lake City 1980- 2008. His many teacher awards and recognitions included an NEH/Reader’s Digest Teacher Scholar Award (a full year paid research sabbatical) for the 1989- 1990, a winner of the prestigious Milken Educator Award in 1999, He earn a Ph.D. in English Education from The University of Georgia where he won the Carol Fisher Award for Outstanding Graduate Research in the Department of Language Education. He is the current president elect of ALAN (2018-2018). He was co-editor of The ALAN Review, from 2009 to 2014. He is a co-founder and co-editor of Study and Scrutiny: Research in Young adult literature. He has authored or co-authored over 40 academic papers and book chapters. He has also co-edited 5 books on teaching YA literature in various contexts. He has published in a variety of journals including English Journal, Signal Journal, The ALAN Review, Principal Leadership, Journal of School Leadership, English Education, English in Education, and Teaching and Teacher Education. He is also the co-founder and director the annual LSU Young Adult Literature Conference and Seminar that now continues at UNLV.
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James Blasingame focuses on Young Adult Literature, Indigenous education, secondary writing instruction, preparing pre-service teachers, and cowboy poetry. He is the executive director of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English (ALAN) and has also been ALAN president and The ALAN Review co-editor. For 14 years he was editor of the “Books for Adolescents and Adults” pages of the Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy. He is the author or coauthor of John Green: Teen Whisperer, Stephenie Meyer: Into Twilight, Using Mentor Texts: Middle School, Books That Don’t Bore ‘Em: Young Adult Literature for Today’s Generation, Gary Paulsen (Teen Reads: Student Companions to Young Adult Literature, Teaching Writing in Middle and Secondary Schools, and They Rhymed with Their Boots On: A Teacher’s Guide to Cowboy Poetry. He has been the ASU Parents’ Association Professor of the Year. the ASU Zebulon Pearce Professor for the Humanities, the Pat Tillman Veterans’ Professor, and the Arizona Humanities Council Dan Shilling Public Scholar Award. Before coming to Arizona State University in 2000, Blasingame spent 24 years in secondary education.
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Sarah J. Donovan, PhD, is a junior English language arts teacher and adjunct professor in middle and secondary education. She wrote Genocide Literature in Middle and Secondary Classrooms (2016) and the young adult novel Alone Together (2018). Dr. Donovan’s writes the the Books in Review (2019) column for The ALAN Review and serves as a state representative and board member for The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of NCTE (ALAN). She presents at local, national, and international conferences about readers’ and writers’ workshop and has hosts a weekly blog, Ethical ELA. She 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 Loss to Societal Grieving (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Contending with Gun Violence in the English Language Classroom (Routledge, 2019).
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Dr. E. Sybil Durand is an assistant professor in English Education in the Department of English at Arizona State University. Her scholarship is grounded in post-colonial and curriculum theories, which situate literature and education at the intersections of sociocultural, historical, political, and national contexts. Her research focuses on representations of youth of color in young adult literature, including multicultural, international, and postcolonial young adult texts, and how teachers and students engage such narratives. Her latest study examines how middle school students engage young adult literature in the context of a Youth Participatory Action Research after school program.
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Gretchen Rumohr-Voskuil ([email protected]) is an associate professor of English and department chair at Aquinas College, where she teaches writing and language arts methods. She is a regular contributor to Dr. Birkmore's YA Wednesday Blog and has published, presented, and reviewed for various NCTE efforts. She has also written poetry for Language Arts Journal of Michigan as well as The Paterson Review. She lives, happily reads, and walks her five-pound Yorkshire Terrier in west Michigan, despite its epic lake effect snowfall.
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S.R. Toliver is pursuing a Ph.D. in Language and Literacy Education at The University of Georgia. Her current research is based in the critical tradition, analyzing young adult speculative fiction in an effort to promote social justice and equity in the English classroom. Within this research area, she focuses on representations of and responses to people of color in speculative fiction texts to discuss the implications of erasing youth of color from futuristic and imaginative contexts. Toliver’s research interests include speculative fiction, narrative analysis, Afrofuturism, and Black girl literacies. Her work has been published in Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, Journal of Children's Literature, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and English Journal.
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Featured Librarians
Amanda Melilli is the Head of the UNLV Teacher Development & Resources Library which supports the teacher education programs within the UNLV College of Education as well as P12 educators in the Las Vegas Community. She specializes in youth library services and collections with a focus on the discovery and evaluation of diverse children’s/young adult literature. Her primary research interest is exploring library contributions to student success through programming and collection development.
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Brittany Paloma Fiedler is a Teaching and Learning Librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where she coordinates information literacy instruction for the university’s first-year composition program. She holds an MS in Library and Information Science (UIUC) in addition to an MA in English Literature and BS in Secondary Education (both UNLV). Before entering academia, she was a high school English teacher and a middle school librarian.
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Jen Nails, a proud Las Vegas native, Jen's passions include theater, yoga, writing & books (of course), and her two sons, Zac and Simon. She is the K-12 librarian at the Adelson Educational Campus here in Las Vegas and has published the middle grade novels Next to Mexico (HMH, 2008) and One Hundred Spaghetti Strings (HarperCollins, 2017). She's also wild about baking anything involving chocolate, preparing homemade spaghetti, and hiking; she's a national park enthusiast and would like to visit all 59 parks while she's still kicking (only 49 more to go). Her novel-in-progress centers on three 6th graders' reactions to the implosion of a loved Las Vegas landmark. She is thrilled to be presenting among the impressive line-up that Dr. Bickmore has assembled. @jenmnails, www.jennails.com
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Below is a Current Draft of the Program with Session Descriptions
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