Speakers
The caliber of speakers at NCTE’s Annual Convention is consistently singled out by attendees as one of the best things about attending. These individuals are sure to make #NCTE23 the most meaningful professional learning experience of your year!
Register today to hear from these and other great speakers at #NCTE23!
Keynote Speakers
This year’s keynote speakers bring a range of perspectives to the mic. We’re thrilled to share this stellar lineup with you!
All times are Eastern Time.
This page will be continuously updated.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Thursday Opening General Session | 11/16/2023 4:00 p.m.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio, and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" grant. His most recent book, A Little Devil in America, was the winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us until They Kill Us, was named one of the books of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, and the Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is forthcoming from Random House on March 26, 2024. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Jacqueline Woodson
Friday General Session | 11/17/2023 8:15 a.m.
Jacqueline Woodson received a 2023 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2023 E. B. White Award, a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award, and was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Her New York Times bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, and the NAACP Image Award. Her books for young readers include Coretta Scott King Award- and NAACP Image Award-winner Before the Ever After, New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin and Harbor Me, Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster, and Each Kindness, which won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.
Tom Hanks
Saturday General Session | 11/18/2023 9:45 a.m.
Tom Hanks is an actor, director, writer, and producer. He has starred in over 40 films, including Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Big, Sleepless in Seattle, Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and many more. Most recently, he was seen in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City and Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, and he is the author of a best-selling collection of stories, Uncommon Type. The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece is his debut novel.
Angie Thomas
Sunday General Session | 11/19/2023 12:00 p.m.
Angie Thomas is the author of the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling novels The Hate U Give, On the Come Up, and Concrete Rose as well as Find Your Voice: A Guided Journal for Writing Your Truth. She is also a coauthor of the bestselling collaborative novels Blackout and Whiteout. Thomas divides her time between her native Jackson, Mississippi, and Atlanta, Georgia.
María Fránquiz
Sunday General Session | 11/19/2023 12:00 p.m.
María E. Fránquiz is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Austin. She is currently member of the WestEd Board of Directors, co-editor of the Bilingual Research Journal, and has co-authored the books Inside the Latin@ Experience: A Latin@ Reader and Scholars in the Field: The Challenges of Migrant Education. Recognition of her work includes the NCRLL Distinguished Senior Scholar award, NCTE Advancement of People of Color Leadership Award, the AERA Div G Faculty Mentor Award. She is most proud of her 20 years as Mentor and 6 years as Director of NCTE’s Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color program.
Angus Fletcher
NCTE Story Experience | 11/18/2023 5:45 p.m.
Angus Fletcher (PhD, Yale) is a professor of story science at Ohio State's Project Narrative. His research has been called "mind blowing" by Malcolm Gladwell and "life changing" by Brené Brown. His most recent books are Wonderworks and Storythinking. In 2023, he was awarded the Commendation Medal by the US Army for his "groundbreaking research" with the Army Nurse Corps and US Army Special Operations.
Meal Event Speakers
Ticketed meals are offered during the NCTE Annual Convention. These events include talks by education luminaries and announcements of award winners by NCTE Sections and groups, including the Children’s Book Awards. Tickets to meal events can be purchased when registering for the Convention.
All times are Eastern Time.
This page will be continuously updated.
Antero Garcia
English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) Luncheon | 11/17/2023 11:30 a.m.
Antero Garcia is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. His research explores the possibilities of speculative imagination and healing in educational research. Prior to completing his PhD, Garcia was an English teacher at a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. His recent research explores learning and literacies in tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons and the civic learning possibilities in various learning environments. Based on his research, Garcia co-designed the Critical Design and Gaming School—a public high school in South Central Los Angeles. His recent books include All through the Town: The School Bus as Educational Technology, Everyday Advocacy: Teachers Who Change the Literacy Narrative (coauthored with Cathy Fleischer), and Civics for the World to Come: Committing to Democracy in Every Classroom (coauthored with Nicole Mirra). Garcia currently co-edits La Cuenta, an online publication centering the voices and perspectives of individuals labeled undocumented in the US: https://lacuenta.substack.com.
Nicole Mirra
English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE) Luncheon | 11/17/2023 11:30 a.m.
Nicole Mirra is an associate professor of urban teacher education in the Department of Learning & Teaching at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education. She previously taught secondary literacy and debate in Brooklyn, New York, and Los Angeles, California. Her work utilizes participatory design methods in classroom, community, and digital spaces to collaboratively create civic learning environments with youth and educators that disrupt discourses and structures of racial injustice and creatively compose liberatory social futures. Her books include Educating for Empathy: Literacy Learning and Civic Engagement, Doing Youth Participatory Action Research: Transforming Inquiry with Researchers, Educators, and Students (coauthored with Antero Garcia and Ernest Morrell), and Civics for the World to Come: Committing to Democracy in Every Classroom (coauthored with Antero Garcia).
Dashka Slater
Middle Level Section Luncheon | 11/17/2023 11:30 a.m.
Dashka Slater is the New York Times bestselling author of The 57 Bus, which won the Stonewall Book Award and was a YALSA nonfiction finalist. She is also the author of the nonfiction title Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed. Slater's fiction includes The Book of Fatal Errors; the picture book Escargot, which won the Wanda Gag Book Award; Baby Shoes; The Antlered Ship, which was a Junior Library Guild Selection and received four-starred reviews; and Dangerously Ever After. She is also an award-winning journalist whose articles have appeared in Newsweek, Salon, the New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones. She lives in California.
Amber McBride
ALAN Breakfast | 11/18/2023 7:00 a.m.
Amber McBride estimates she reads about 100 books a year. Her work has been published in literary magazines including Ploughshares and Provincetown Arts. Her debut young adult novel, Me (Moth), was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent, among many other accolades. She is also the author of the acclaimed young adult novel We Are All So Good at Smiling and her debut middle grade novel, Gone Wolf. She is a professor of creative writing at University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Renée Watson
Secondary Section Luncheon | 11/18/2023 12:30 p.m.
Renée Watson is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, educator, and community activist. Her books have sold over one million copies. Her young adult novel Piecing Me Together received a Coretta Scott King Award and a Newbery Honor. Her children's picture books and novels for teens have received several awards and international recognition. She has given readings and lectures at many places, including the United Nations, the Library of Congress, and the US embassies in Japan and New Zealand. Her poetry and fiction center the experiences of Black girls and women and explore themes of home, identity, and the intersections of race, class, and gender.
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond
Children’s Book Awards Luncheon | 11/18/2023 12:30 p.m.
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond is the author of Powder Necklace, which Publishers Weekly called "a winning debut." She was a 2019 Edward Albee Foundation Fellow, a 2018 Pa Gya! Literary Festival guest author, a 2018 Ake Arts and Book Festival guest author, a 2018 Hobart Festival of Women Writers guest author, a 2017 Aspen Ideas Festival scholar, a 2016 Hedgebrook writer-in-residence, a 2015 Rhode Island Writers Colony writer-in-residence, and in both 2015 and 2014 she was shortlisted for a Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholarship. In April 2015 she was the opening speaker at TEDxAccra. Every month, Brew-Hammond co-leads a monthly writing fellowship at Manhattan's Center for Faith and Work.
Georgia Heard
Children’s Book Awards Luncheon | 11/18/2023 12:30 p.m.
Georgia Heard holds an MFA in writing from Columbia University and is the founder of The Poet’s Studio, an online platform that offers writing workshops. She taught writing in the New York City schools for over a decade and currently works as a consultant, visiting author, and keynote speaker in school districts and conferences in the US and internationally. Heard received the NCTE 2023 Excellence in Poetry for Children Award and has written numerous children's books, including Welcome to the Wonder House (coauthored with Rebecca Kai Dotlich) and My Thoughts Are Clouds: Poems for Mindfulness. She has also authored many books on teaching writing and poetry, including the forthcoming second edition of Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School.
Dayna Lorentz
Children’s Book Awards Luncheon | 11/18/2023 12:30 p.m.
Dayna Lorentz is the author of Of a Feather, the Dogs of the Drowned City trilogy, and the No Safety in Numbers trilogy. She has worked in and around the foster care system, most recently as a law clerk in the Vermont family courts, and has just started exploring the sport of falconry. Lorentz lives in Vermont with her husband and two children.
Traci Sorell
Children’s Literature Assembly Breakfast | 11/19/2023 7:00 a.m.
A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Traci Sorell writes bestselling, award-winning fiction and nonfiction in a variety of formats for children and young adults. Many of her stories highlight Cherokee values such as cooperation, education, and humility. Sorell is a two-time Sibert Medal and Orbis Pictus honoree for her nonfiction work. Her first five books received awards from the American Indian Library Association. In 2023, she shares Contenders: Two Native Baseball Players, One World Series, a nonfiction picture book biography illustrated by Arigon Starr, and Mascot, a middle grade fiction novel-in-verse coauthored with poet Charles Waters. A former federal Indigenous law attorney and advocate, Sorell understands and appreciates the critical roles that reading, critical thinking, and creativity play in education and future success.
Tonya B. Perry
Affiliate Breakfast | 11/19/2023 7:00 a.m.
Tonya B. Perry, interim provost at Miles College in Fairfield, Alabama, is a tireless advocate for students and educators who are often denied a voice. She works with and for educators, students, and communities to develop programs and initiatives that uplift historically marginalized peoples. In addition, she has advocated for others on numerous committees, including as a member of the NCTE Executive Committee, NCTE Research Foundation trustee, member of the NCTE Inclusivity Task Force, NCTEAR chairperson, NCTE Editorial Board member, and director for NCTE’s Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color program. She currently is NCTE Vice President and serves on the National Writing Project’s board of directors. Perry has also served the nation as a 2000 National Teacher of the Year finalist and a two-time National Board-Certified Teacher. She has worked as a middle school teacher, teacher educator, full professor, executive director, and principal investigator for a large GEAR UP grant, director of the Red Mountain Writing Project, and both interim department chair and executive director for outreach and engagement for a school of education. Her coauthored book Teaching for Racial Equity: Becoming Interrupters (2022) is a collaborative work with two teacher educators, Steven Zemelman and Katy Smith, and other brilliant teacher-writers.
Sandra Murphy
National Writing Project Brunch | 11/19/2023 10:30 a.m.
Sandra Murphy, a former high school teacher of English and journalism, is now professor emerita at the University of California, Davis, where she acted as faculty advisor to the Area 3 Writing Project. She served on the Standing Committee for the National Assessment of Educational Progress and coauthored the Common Core State Standards for writing. Among her publications are three she has written with Mary Ann Smith: Writing Portfolios: A Bridge from Teaching to Assessment, Uncommonly Good Ideas: Teaching Writing in the Common Core Era, and Writing to Make an Impact. Her most recent publication is Assessing Writing to Support Learning: Turning Accountability Inside Out (with Peggy O’Neill).
Mary Ann Smith
National Writing Project Brunch | 11/19/2023 10:30 a.m.
Mary Ann Smith, a former secondary English and journalism teacher, has directed the Bay Area and California Writing Projects and has co-directed the National Writing Project and served as its government relations director. Her publications include Writing Portfolios: A Bridge from Teaching to Assessment, Uncommonly Good Ideas: Teaching Writing in the Common Core Era, and Writing to Make an Impact, all coauthored with Sandra Murphy, and Assessing Writing Teaching Writers with Sherry Seale Swain. Her most recent edited volume with Sandra Murphy is When Challenge Brings Change: How Teacher Breakthroughs Transform the Classroom.
Featured Speakers
Featured speakers present at designated sessions that address current issues in the field that reverberate through our classrooms.
Cultivating Curiosity, Creativity, and Gratitude—How Two Authors Spread the Magic of Wonder across All 50 States and How You Can Do the Same in Your Classroom
Nick Garcia, Washington College; Amanda Ensor; Alison Morris, First Book; Matthew Swanson, Random House Children's Books, First Book; Robbi Behr, Random House Children's Books, First Book; Bridget Bunten | 11/16/2023 9:30 a.m.
Children’s book creators Robbi Behr and Matthew Swanson spent last year visiting schools in all 50 states on an epic road trip to promote reading, inspire storytelling, and help students tap into curiosity and gratitude as sources for their own creativity. In this session they share the tools they used and things they discovered, to help you create classrooms that cultivate life-long learning.
Random House Children's Books, First Book
Connecting Writing and Reading through Sentence Combining
Session Chair Stephanie Reid, University of Cincinnati; Presenter Beverly Ann Chin, University of Montana | 11/16/2023 1:00 p.m.
In this lively session, we explore how sentence combining can improve students' written sentence fluency and improve their reading comprehension of complex texts. By teaching sentence combining, we smoothly integrate writing and grammar instruction. Learn how sentence combining can build on oral language and then be applied to writing and reading across the curriculum.
Critically Reflecting on Global Children’s Literature through a Cosmopolitan Lens of Loyalty and Openness
Session Chair Kathy G. Short, University of Arizona; Presenters: Kathleen Crawford-McKinney, Wayne State University; Desiree Cueto, University of Arizona; Deanna Day, Washington State University; Mary L. Fahrenbruck, New Mexico State University; Holly Johnson, University of Cincinnati; Hee Young Kim, West Texas A&M University; Janelle Mathis, University of North Texas; Cynthia Ryman, California State University, Monterey Bay; Yoo Kyung Sung, University of New Mexico | 11/17/2023 11:00 a.m.
Critical inquiry and social responsibility provide a cosmopolitan lens on our work with elementary teachers to encourage open-mindedness to people and ideas that differ from their own. We will share the theoretical and curricular frameworks that guide our work and many examples of putting these ideas into practice in our teaching contexts through engagements that explore belonging and becoming.
Expanding Young Learners’ Literacy Skills in History, STEAM, and Social Emotional Learning with the Smithsonian
Monique M. Chism, Smithsonian Institution; Ashley Naranjo, Smithsonian Office of the Under Secretary for Education; Ariel Moon, National Museum of African American History and Culture; Emily Porter, Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute; Maureen Leary, National Postal Museum | 11/17/2023 12:30 p.m.
Join a panel of Smithsonian education experts to explore PreK-3 classroom strategies, rooted in inquiry, perspective-taking, understanding the world around us, and learning through play. Teachers will leave with a strong foundation in how to use museums and their collections as a springboard for fun and meaningful learning experiences that inspire curiosity and connection.
Smithsonian Institution
Indigeneity, Place, and Literacy Education
Madison Eagle, Tsalagi (Cherokee) and Shawnee, Unenrolled; The Ohio State University; Shannon Gonzales-Miller, Southern Ute (not enrolled); The Ohio State University; Joaquin Munoz, Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona; University of British Columbia; Tim San Pedro, The Ohio State University | 11/18/2023 11:00 a.m.
Indigenous pedagogy roots education in relationship to place, spirit, and peoples. This panel will share their educational expertise and lived experiences to help literacy educators begin to better understand the needs of the classroom to be inclusive of Indigenous Peoples’. Attendees will hear how they can better inform their practice and environments to address the deficits in Indigenous advocacy in education.
No One Is an Island: Cultivating Strategies to Support Professional Connections
Katie Batting, PA Cyber; Amy Nyeholt, Standing Committee on Affiliates, Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English | 11/18/2023 2:45 p.m.
In this presentation, our goal is to share with teachers and literacy leaders how we make relevant connections starting from one-to-one partnerships and leading to intentional schoolwide interactions to support student and staff learning. We need meaningful and diverse connections in order to stand up, speak out, teach well, understand one another, bridge gaps, recognize challenges, and face them.
AI & Literacy: Navigating the Future of Education
Susan Barber, Midtown High School, Atlanta, GA; Kathrine Green Tech High School, Saint Cloud Area School District #742, MN; Megan Mize, Old Dominion University; Larry Reiff, Roslyn Middle School, NY | 11/18/2023 4:15 p.m.
In today's rapidly evolving educational landscape, the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and literacy education holds immense potential for transforming teaching and learning. Join us for an insightful panel discussion tailored to literacy teachers and English educators, where we'll explore innovative strategies and practical plans to harness the power of AI in the classroom. Attendees will leave with concrete plans and strategies to integrate AI into their literacy and English classrooms effectively.
Making NCTE Your Home: Leadership and Engagement Opportunities throughout Our Organization
Presenters Amy Bouch, Chartiers Valley Middle School; Sierra Gilbertson, Fosston High School; Anna Osborn, Jefferson Middle School; Committee Chairs: Nicholas Emmanuele, Millcreek Township School District; Xenia Hadjioannou, Penn State University, Berks Campus; KaaVonia Hinton, Old Dominion University; Jung Kim, Lewis University; Mark Letcher, Lewis University; Amy Nyeholt, Standing Committee on Affiliates; PCTELA (Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts); Sean Ruday, Longwood University | 11/19/2023 9:00 a.m.
Remember those college student organization fairs we used to attend? We are taking a page out of their book. Come find your communities in the different assemblies, caucuses, special interest groups, and more who help to make NCTE such a strong, interconnected professional organization. See how you can bring your experiences and perspectives to these various groups to help NCTE thrive.