Carl Anderson is an internationally recognized expert on the teaching of writing for grades K-8. A former elementary and middle school teacher, he has worked as a literacy consultant in schools and districts around the world for 30 years. Carl is the author of numerous books on the teaching of writing, including How to Become a Better Writing Teacher (with Matt Glover), Teaching Fantasy Writing: Lessons that Inspire Student Engagement and Creativity K-6, A Teacher’s Guide to Mentor Texts K-5, A Teacher’s Guide to Writing Conferences K-8, and the bestselling classic, How’s It Going? A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers.

Louise Borden is the award-winning author of 32 books for young readers, including THE JOURNEY THAT SAVED CURIOUS GEORGE – The True Wartime Escape of Margret and H.A. Rey. Louise’s subjects range from first graders to baseball to World War II.

Last May, 500 students in Ramsgate, England read Borden’s THE LITTLE SHIPS and made origami boats for exhibits to honor the 85th anniversary of the rescue at Dunkirk. In the fall of 2025, THE GREATEST SKATING RACE was part of a picture book exhibit at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial in Germany to foster Global Citizenship Education and highlight the themes of hope and friendship.

Louise has spoken in hundreds of schools, libraries, and museums across the U.S. and her newest book THANK YOU, SCHOOL, illustrated by Paige Keiser, will be published by Holiday House in March, 2026.

Louise lives with her husband Peter in Cincinnati. The Bordens are frequent visitors to Denver where their oldest daughter, Catie, lives with her family and teaches Spanish to middle schoolers.

Gravity Goldberg is an educational consultant and author of ten books on teaching including The Body-Brain Connection, Mindsets and Moves, Teach Like Yourself, and Active Learning. During her 25 years of teaching experience she has served as a science teacher, reading specialist, third grade teacher, special educator, literacy coach, staff developer, and assistant professor. As the founding director of Gravity Goldberg, LLC she leads a team that offers side-by-side coaching and workshops that focus on teachers as decision-makers and student-led instruction.

Aimee Buckner Haisten is an experienced educator with a deep understanding of language arts instruction. Aimee not only inspires teachers and students to love reading but also to find joy in writing.  Aimee is the author of several Stenhouse books, including the best selling, Notebook Knowhow: Strategies for the Writer’s Notebook. She lives with her husband just outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

Katie Kelly is a Professor of Education at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. As a former teacher and literacy coach, Katie’s teaching and research interests include engaging children in meaningful literacy experiences and practices to foster critically curious and compassionate lifelong readers and writers. She has co-authored several books including her newest book From Empathy to Action: Empowering K-6 Students to Create Change through Reading, Writing, and Research (Routledge). Her other books include Critical Comprehension: Lessons for Guiding Students to Deeper Meaning (Corwin); Reading To Make a Difference: Using Literature to Help Students Think Deeply Speak Freely and Take Action (Heinemann); From Pencils to Podcasts: Digital Tools to Transform K-12 Literacy Practices (Solution Tree); and Smuggling Writing: Strategies that Get Students to Write Every Day, in Every Content Area (3-12) (Corwin). Katie is available for professional development and speaking engagements and can be contacted at ktkelly24@gmail.com.

Penny Kittle has surrounded herself with young people, great books, and piles of their writing notebooks for 41 years across five states. She currently teaches writing part-time at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. She knows the power of two essential things: all students will build independent reading lives of joy, curiosity, and hunger when given agency; and teachers who write with their students generate community and creative power. She is the author of nine books including Micro Mentor Texts, 180 Days, Book Love, and Write Beside Them. She is the Chairman of the board of the Book Love Foundation where we believe in empowering teachers through grants for books and a vibrant, worldwide community of free professional learning with authors and educators.

Rajani LaRocca was born in India, raised in Kentucky, and now lives in the Boston area, where she practices medicine and writes award-winning books for young readers, including the Newbery Honor winning middle grade novel in verse, Red, White, and Whole. She’s always been an omnivorous reader, and now she is an omnivorous writer of fiction and nonfiction, novels and picture books, prose and poetry. She finds inspiration in her family, her childhood, the natural world, math, science, and just about everywhere she looks. Learn more about Rajani and her books at www.RajaniLaRocca.com and Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook, and LinkedIn. She also co-hosts the STEM Women in KidLit Podcast.

Cara’s debut memoir, Voice Lessons: A Sisters Story, was a Good Reads Choice Award nominee in 2017. She has since co-authored two picture books with her sister, Idina Menzel,titled Loud Mouse and Proud Mouse. Her humorous personal essays are featured in The Empty Next, on Substack.

Cara has her master's degree in elementary education with an emphasis on children's literacy. She has spent over 15 years in elementary schools as a literacy specialist and a classroom teacher in Boulder, Colorado. While currently an empty nester, Cara raised a Brady Bunch of boys with the love of her life and now looks for every opportunity to surround herself with children. In this very moment she is probably sitting criss-cross applesauce in her kindergarten classroom, and poorly playing Down By the Bay on the ukulele.

Dr. Ashlee Saddler is the District Support Chief for the University of Virginia’s Partnership for Leaders in Education (UVA-PLE). In this role, Ashlee travels the country partnering with school and district leaders to transform instructional practices, generate tangible solutions to systemic challenges, and drive sustainable change that improves student achievement outcomes. She also serves as the Senior Director of Leadership at the Public Education and Business Coalition (PEBC), where she facilitates engaging, timely, and interactive professional learning experiences designed specifically for adult learners. Over the past 18 years, Ashlee has distinguished herself as a successful leader, serving as a Director of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education, principal, and assistant principal in the Aurora Public Schools district. Ashlee embodies hard work, dedication, and integrity, creating an infectious energy that inspires others to be their best. She consistently holds herself and those around her to high expectations—an unwavering value throughout her career.

Ashlee began her career as a mental health professional and provided mental health and therapeutic services to students, children, and families. Ashlee has earned her Master’s of Social Work from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has worked in the mental health field in Illinois, Indiana, and Colorado. Ashlee earned her second Master’s Degree from Colorado State University in education and completed her doctoral studies at Baylor University. Ashlee’s passion for supporting and developing others has extended to her doctoral research, which centers around professional learning for principals.  

Through her consulting business, Ashlee facilitates leadership development to leaders in business, educational, private, and non-profit sectors. She also offers executive coaching and health coaching. Ashlee enjoys presenting keynotes, facilitating learning to educators, growing and developing as a leader, and mentoring upcoming leaders. In her spare time, Ashlee is pushing herself physically in the gym and traveling the world with her family.

John Schu is the children’s librarian for Bookelicious, a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, and a former classroom teacher and teacher-librarian. John Schu has made a career out of advocating for the people and things he cares about most: kids, books, and the people who connect them. He is the children’s librarian for Bookelicious and the New York Times best-selling author of Louder Than Hunger; This Is a School, illustrated by Veronica Miller Jamison; This Is a Story, illustrated by Caldecott Honor artist Lauren Castillo; Ruthie Rose’s Big Idea, illustrated by Holly Hatam; and The Gift of Story: Exploring the Affective Side of the Reading Life. John Schu lives in Naperville, Illinois. You can find him at JohnSchu.com and on social media at @MrSchuReads.

Colby Sharp is a husband and father of five. He teaches fifth grade at Parma Elementary. Colby is the co-founder of Nerdy Book Club. He co-hosts The Yarn podcast with Travis Jonker. Colby co-authored Game Changer! Book Access for All Kid with Donalyn Miller, and he is the editor of The Creativity Project: An Awesometastic Story Collection. A Commonsense Guide to Your Classroom Library written with Donalyn Miller, is his latest book.

Cris Tovani is an internationally known consultant who focuses on issues of disciplinary reading, assessment strategies, and writing instruction. She was awarded the 2017 Thought Leader award from the International Literacy Association. Cris has been an adjunct professor at several Colorado universities. She is the author of five books. Her most recent from Stenhouse is, Why do I Have to Read This? Literacy Strategies to Engage Our Most Reluctant Students. Other books by Cris are: No More Telling as Teaching-Less Lecture-More Engaged Learning, I Read it but I Don’t Get It, Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? and So, What do They Really Know?

For 39 years, Cris taught students from grades one to twelve. She continues to study the “knowing-doing gap” by investigating how best practice research can be practically applied to meet a variety of learners’ needs. Cris’s Literacy Lab Project enables her to provide demonstration teaching lessons in districts around the US. Embracing a growth mindset, she loves sharing her successes and failures with colleagues as they work to serve students.

Amy Ludwig VanDerwater is the author of books for children and teachers including: Forest Has a Song, Write! Write! Write!, Poems are Teachers and The Sound of Kindness. As a former classroom teacher, staff developer and visiting author, she has loved teaching writing for over twenty-five years. You can find her at home in Western New York, knitting, baking, picking berries, and blogging poetry and lessons at The Poem Farm, her ad-and-AI-free blog for young writers.

Jen Vincent (she/her/ella) is a writer, educator, entrepreneur, and lover of life who celebrates the human experience through writing. With extensive experience in special education, curriculum development, instructional technology integration, teacher coaching, and working with multilingual learners, she currently serves as a 6th-8th grade Middle School Social Studies/Language Arts Teacher for Bannockburn School, a K-8 district in a northern suburb of Chicago. She is a National Board Certified Teacher in Early/Middle Childhood Literacy and an active member of the National Council of Teachers of English. In 2024, she was honored with NCTE’s Don H. Graves Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Writing. As the founder of Story Exploratory, she offers workshops, coaching, and professional development to help writers explore what it means to live the life of a writer. Living the Life of a Writer: 6 Practices Student Writers Have, Know, and Do is her first book on student-centered, inquiry-based writing instruction. Learn more at storyexploratory.com and at @storyexploratory on Instagram.

My career started with student teaching at Abraham Lincoln High School in Denver, Colorado in January of 1996. Since then, I have taught in Washington State, Illinois, and Colorado (mostly in Colorado), both high school and university methods classes (but mostly high school). I am proud to be public school educated, K through PhD, with all but three of those years in Colorado schools. I teach language arts at Fairview High School in Boulder, Colorado, where I live with my husband and dog, across town from our college student daughter who is studying art at CU. See more at SarahMZerwin.com.