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Cynthia Levinson writes nonfiction for young readers. Her debut middle-grade book, We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March, won numerous awards, including the Jane Addams Book Award and the IRA Young Adult Nonfiction Award. Her forthcoming book Watch Out for Flying Kids addresses multicultural issues in Israel and the United States through two children’s circuses. In addition, she is writing a biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her short nonfiction pieces have been published in Cobblestone, Faces, and other magazines. She lives in Austin and Boston.

Maren Aukerman is an assistant professor at Stanford University's School of Education. She is currently on the review board for Language Arts as well as for the Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adults’ Literature (Routledge, 2009). Her research focuses on the relationship between classroom discourse and reading comprehension, with emphasis on children’s talk surrounding literature and their talk about nonfiction texts.

Kim Blevins teaches high school English and journalism. She was awarded the 2011-2012 Missouri Secondary Educator of the Year by the Missouri State Teacher’s Association. Blevins is a Teacher-consultant with the Ozarks Writing Project, an affiliate of the National Writing Project. She earned her bachelor’s degree and teaching certificate from Missouri State University and her master’s degree in Education from Lindenwood University.

Alicia taught for 30 years in the Brookline Public Schools in Brookline, Massachusetts. She was a Chinese bilingual teacher, then a first-grade educator and finally a third-grade teacher. In 2008, Hsu was awarded the Ernest R. Caverly Award for teaching excellence by the Brookline Education Foundation. She is committed to exploring the ways in which art and story can connect young people, families and communities.

Barbie is a school counselor at a dual-language elementary school in North Carolina, and a member of the Teaching Tolerance Advisory Board. Her passion for issues of race, immigration, gender and sexual justice is a strong influence in her school counseling program. In 2013, Garayúa-Tudryn founded Mariposas, a group for Latina girls that promotes empowerment by exploring issues of intersectionality, social emotional health and civic engagement.

Heather A. O'Connell is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University, and a recent graduate from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her work contributes to understandings of race and racial inequalities in the United States by examining differences across places. This spatial lens has led to a focus on processes connected to racial composition, history, region, and migration.

Ernest Morrell is an associate professor in the Urban Schooling division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies (GSE&IS) and Associate Director for Youth Research at the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA) at the University of California at Los Angeles. For more than a decade he has worked with adolescents, drawing on their involvement with popular culture to promote academic literacy development. Morrell is also interested in the applications of critical pedagogy in urban education and working with teens as critical researchers. Morrell previously taught

Carrie Kilman is a writer and activist based in Madison, Wis.

Butler is a Wisconsin college student majoring in English and journalism.

Dorman is a middle school psychologist and project facilitator in California.