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Caroline T. Clark a is Professor in the College of Education and Human Ecology, Department of Teaching and Learning and has been a faculty member on the Columbus campus of the Ohio State University since 1996. She specializes in English education, adolescent literacies, community engagement, and supporting diverse people in schools, especially LGBTQ and gender creative students. She is the Faculty Lead for the English Language Arts AYA 7-12 licensure program and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on methods of teaching literature to middle and high school students. Her research focuses on language and literacy practices and collaborative research with teachers, young people, and families in service of advocacy for social justice. She does this work through the frameworks of collaborative and practitioner inquiry and through the use of ethnographic methods and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). For over 12 years, she co-led a teacher-inquiry group whose purposes have ranged from using literature, film, and other media to combat homophobia and heterosexism in classrooms, to examining how LGBTQIA+ youth and families experience support and non-support in schools; and what factors enable or inhibit adults’ willingness to provide support to these young people and families. Currently, she is researching antiracist approaches to teacher education and collaboratively creating critical race media literacy curricula with local teachers. Her research has been published in the American Educational Research Journal, Reading Research Quarterly, the Journal of Literacy Research, and the English Journal, among other scholarly outlets, and she has co-edited three books and co-authored a fourth. Dr. Clark has served as the President of the National Council of Research on Language and Literacy (NCRLL); as chair of the National Council of Teachers of English Assembly for Research (NCTEAR); as a member of the NCTE Standing Committee on Research; and as a member of the NCTE Commission on Composition, among other leadership roles. Her research has been funded by the American Educational Research Association and the Spencer Foundation. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Indiana University, Bloomington, in English and Education, and both her MA (Reading) and PhD (Language and Literacy) from the University of Michigan.

Yana Hashamova is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Slavic Studies and Core/Affiliate Professor of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts; Comparative Studies; Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies; and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. Honorary Research Associate at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Institute of Culture and Memory Studies), Dr. Hashamova is also editor of the Slavic and East European Journal, the publication of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. In her interdisciplinary monographs and multi-disciplinary co-edited volumes, she strives to establish links between political ideology and constructs of national, ethnic, and gender identities in cultures, while analyzing power relations and post-Soviet conditions. Her research was advanced through numerous multidisciplinary grant collaborations, including the Sawyer Seminar funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme (GAHDT) grants, among others.

As director of the Slavic Center (2008-2015), Dr. Hashamova wrote two successful Title VI grant proposals and brought more than $4,000,000 for program development and student fellowships at Ohio State University. As chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures (2013-2021) she designed new curriculum and guided the creation of new degree programs, as well as established community collaborations with public schools. Most of these initiatives aim at expanding students’ knowledge of ethnic, religious, and gender minorities in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Chiquita R N Toure was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. She is a proud graduate of Chicago Public Schools and received both her B.S. in Elementary Education and M.Ed. in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a second M.Ed. in School Library and Information Technologies from Mansfield University in Mansfield Pennsylvania. Chiquita's passion as a literacy liberatory has spanned almost 30 years. In 1995 she relocated to Columbus, Ohio and has spent 13 years first as an ELA educator for the elementary and middle school grades and in 2009 she transitioned to the role of school librarian for grades K-12.Currently she serves as the school librarian for the Columbus Africentric Early College for grades 6-12. In addition, to being an educator-librarian she is a speaker, writer and social justice workshop facilitator for non-profits, churches and independent educational organizations. She has received numerous grants which have enabled her to bring creative and innovative programming to the school communities she serves. In 2018 she was awarded the Helen Jenkins Davis Award for Social Justice for her work in transforming the school library space and creating a safe writing hub for students. For her, critical media literacy entails not only reading with a discerning lens but also writing our lives through courageous truth telling. Her future plans are to complete her Ed.D. by 2026 in Educational Policy and Leadership with a concentration in Diversity and Equity also from the UIUC. She would love to teach in higher education and open an independent bookstore where folks can visit, read, write, chat and sip organic tea paired with their favorite books. Chiquita resides in Pickerington, Ohio and is the mother of four daughters and about 25 plants. She enjoys nature walks, vintage shopping ,journaling, and visiting bookstores across the country.

Courtney F. Johnson has spent more than 50% of her life teaching kids in Columbus City Schools. Though that makes her feel old, talking to kids about books every day as a high school librarian makes her feel young. Courtney spent 15 years as a high school English teacher, and earned National Board Certification in English Language Arts for Adolescents and Young Adults in 2014. That same year, Courtney’s classroom was the grateful recipient of Penny Kittle’s Book Love Foundation grant. She has spent the past six years using her Master’s in Library Science degree as a Library Media Specialist in Columbus City Schools. Courtney was awarded the Helen Jenkins Davis Award from the Columbus Education Association in January 2020, which has emboldened her work as an anti-racist teacher. She believes that in the words of Dr. Bettina Love, that we should “work every day as if abolition is around the corner.”

Hannah Green originally grew up in Pataskala, OH before ending up back in Columbus after an eight-year stint teaching in Orlando, Florida. She attended the University of Dayton for public relations and marketing. After graduating she became a substitute teacher, and it was then she realized she should have listened to everyone else. Hannah attended The Ohio State University for her Master of Education in Early Childhood education. Including student teaching, she has taught almost every grade level and subject (except first, second, and third). She spent three years in middle school, three years in fifth grade, and one month in fourth grade before transitioning out of the classroom into the school library where she is happiest. Teaching in a high school never crossed her mind, but she has thoroughly enjoyed working with teenagers for the past seven years as a teacher librarian. For the past five years, Hannah has worked in Columbus City Schools. In her spare time, Hannah loves to travel, spend time with her dog, read, and explore her city!

Matt Burns is an English teacher at Metro Early College High School and an instructor for pre-service educators at The Ohio State University. A Columbus native, he attended Ohio University, where he received bachelor's degrees in journalism and French. After working for four years as a reporter, he joined Ohio State in a marketing / communications role at the Fisher College of Business. Eventually, he listened to a little voice that told him to do something that truly makes a difference and began working toward enrolling in Ohio State's M.Ed. program. After student teaching in Columbus City Schools, he graduated in 2020. Matt has taught almost all grades of high school English but has a passion for engaging upper classmen in critical analysis using literary theory. In his spare time, Matt enjoys going to the movies, running, and scouring the shelves of used bookstores.

Ebony Beckham is a high school English educator at Metro Early College High School and an Academic Writing lecturer for Upward Bound at The Ohio State University. After graduating from Ohio State in 2015 with a Bachelor's degree in Human Ecology, Ebony spent the next few years serving with City Year Columbus to provide academic, attendance, and social-emotional enrichment to students on the city's near-east side. After this life-changing opportunity, Ebony continued to gain experience working with youth through her local YMCA and as a result, enrolled in the Master of Education program at Ohio State where she then earned her degree in English/Integrated Language Arts in Spring of 2020. As a native of Cleveland, Ebony enjoys traveling, boxing, thrifting, and cheering for the Cleveland Browns.

Christian Hines is an Assistant Professor of Reading and Literacy at Texas State University. She is a former high school English teacher and Blerd (black nerd) and teacher educator whose work centers on the use of diverse young adult literature and multimodal texts in the secondary English Language Arts classroom. She leans into comics and graphic novels, specifically diverse teen superhero narratives as a way for students and practitioners to understand the intersectional lived experiences of youth and the impact that youth has on society and enacting resistance. She also centers her work around Black girls in comics, literature, pop culture, and in educational spaces. She strives to contextualize the broader terms of her research on the representations of Black girls in middle grade and young adult literature and the ways in which that representation can aid in the identity formations and affirmations of Black girls in the ELA classroom as well creating avenues for them to amplify and create their own multimodal stories. Her work has been published in English Journal, ALAN Review, English Leadership Quarterly, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, Ohio Journal of English Language Arts, and Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education.

Ekaterina Tikhonyuk is a Ph.D. Candidate and Graduate Teaching Associate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University (OSU). Her research centers around contemporary Russian culture and media. In her dissertation she examines the discourse of state-aligned and oppositional news outlets as well as the exchanges that they initiate among social media users in connection with events that reflect the direction of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy. Specifically, she analyzes news coverage of Russia’s sweeping constitutional reform of 2020 and investigates Instagram discourse surrounding Russia-Ukraine war. Prior to starting her graduate program at OSU, Ekaterina taught at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, China, and served as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina.