NWP Radio

Sonya Huber is the author of seven books, including the new guide, Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto, and the award-winning essay collection on chronic pain, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. Her other books include Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir in a Day, Opa Nobody, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, and The Backwards Research Guide for Writers. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and other outlets. She teaches at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield low-residency MFA program.

Michelle Caruso Walker has been working in education for the last 20 years. She’s taught middle school and high school in both CT and NY. Michelle has a PhD from Fordham University and currently works in Westport Public Schools as the middle school instructional coach. She’s also the mom to three boys!

All of us in education can find opportunities to interrupt the status quo that allows inequities to go unchallenged. In Teaching for Racial Equity: Becoming Interrupters, authors Tonya Perry, Steven Zemelman, and Katy Smith show us the way. In this episode of The Write Time, listen to the authors talk about the making and use of this professional text.

Tonya B. Perry is the director of the Red Mountain Writing Project in Birmingham, Alabama. She also is the vice provost of Miles College, a Historically Black College, and a co-author of Teaching for Racial Equity: Becoming Interrupters. She is the vice-president of NCTE. Her favorite pastime is writing and spending time with family and friends.

Katy Smith is the Chair of the Department of Educational Inquiry and Curriculum Studies and the Director of Graduate Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. She began her association with the Illinois Writing Project (IWP) as a teacher-consultant while she was teaching high school students, and now directs IWP with Steve Zemelman.

Steve Zemelman is a visiting scholar at Northeastern Illinois University and a founding director of the Illinois Writing Project. He promotes student civic engagement and restorative justice in Chicago schools. His books on teaching writing and reading have long been widely appreciated, including Best Practice: Bringing Standards to Life in America’s Classrooms (with Harvey Daniels and Arthur Hyde), and From Inquiry to Action: Civic Engagement with Project-Based Learning.

Rose Brock, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Library Science at Sam Houston State University, is a veteran educator and advocate for using audiobooks as a tool for literacy and is the cofounder of the national literacy initiative Guys Listen, a part of the Guys Read literacy national program. Dr. Brock was awarded the Siddie Joe Johnson Award for Outstanding Service to Youth by the Texas Library Association and is cofounder of NTTBF, the North Texas Teen Book Festival. She is the editor of Hope Wins, Hope Nation: Young Adult Authors Share Personal Moments of Inspiration, and author of Young Adult Literature in Action: A Librarian’s Guide.

James Ponti is the New York Times bestselling author of three middle-grade book series: City Spies, about an unlikely squad of five kids from around the world who form an elite MI6 spy team; the Edgar Award-winning FRAMED! Series, about a pair of tweens who solve mysteries in Washington, DC; and the Dead City trilogy, about a secret society that polices the undead living beneath Manhattan. He lives with his family in Orlando, Florida.

Jill Stedronsky is a teacher, professionally, and personally. She teaches 8th graders at William Annin Middle School in Basking Ridge, NJ for the past sixteen years. She is a teacher-consultant for the Drew Writing Project, an adjunct for Drew University, and a researcher. Her focus is intrinsic motivation. She strives to create an authentic environment for her students, and hopefully all students around the world, by motivating her students to read and write for real purposes! She co-authored a chapter with Dr. Kristen Hawley Turner, for the publication of her practice in “Inquiry Ignites! Pushing Back Against Traditional Literacy Instruction.” She hopes to help change curriculum worldwide.

Dr. Yohuru Williams is a distinguished University Chair, Professor of History, and the founding Director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas. He received his Ph.D. from Howard University in 1998 and is the author and editor of several books including Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement and Black Power/White Politics: Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Panthers in New Haven.

Dr. Williams has appeared on a variety of local and national radio and television programs, most notably CNN, BET, History Channel, Huff Post, Matter of Fact Listening Tour with Soledad O’Brien, and NPR. His scholarly articles have appeared in the American Bar Association’s Insights on Law and Society, The Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, The Black Scholar, and The Journal of Black Studies.

Joe Anson has been working in education since 2000. After spending 18+ years in the throes of junior-high language arts in Spanish Fork, Utah, he now works in teacher education at Bellevue University in Nebraska. His involvement with the National Writing Project began in the Central Utah Writing Project’s inaugural year (2009), where he was heavily involved until he and his amazing wife packed up their five kids and moved a thousand miles away. He hopes to become more involved in the Nebraska Writing Project when he is not observing student teachers and designing curriculum such as the new class he is excited to teach: Teaching Adolescent Literature and Social Justice. He is an avid baseball fan and enjoys charring mammal flesh over open flames and dabbling in poetry.

Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Mayra Cuevas is the author of the teen novels Does My Body Offend You? and Salty, Bitter, Sweet. Her short story Resilient was published as part of the anthology FORESHADOW. Mayra is an award-winning producer for CNN and co-founder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival. She keeps her sanity by practicing Buddhist meditation. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, her two stepsons, their fluffy cat and a very loud Chihuahua.

Marie Marquardt is author of YA novels Does My Body Offend You? (with Mayra Cuevas), Dream Things True, The Radius of Us, and Flight Season. Her books have earned many awards and commendations, including BEA Buzz Books, Books all Young Georgians Should Read, and the CLASP Américas Commendation, and they have been shortlisted for several state book awards, including the South Carolina Young Adult Book Award and the Missouri Gateway Readers Award. Marie also has published articles and co-authored two non-fiction books about Latin American immigration to the U.S. South, and has been interviewed about her research, writing, and advocacy on National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and BBC America, among many other media outlets. She lives in a busy household in Decatur, Georgia with her spouse, four kids, several chickens, a dog, and a bearded dragon.

Bryn Orum is the co-director of the Greater Madison Writing Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In her current role she coordinates programs for youth and educators including Rise Up & Write, Youth Press Corps, and the National Writing Project’s College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP). Previously, Bryn co-founded and taught high school English at Clark Street Community School, a public charter dedicated to deep engagement through personalized, democratic, and place-based education, in Middleton, WI. Bryn studied Literacy and English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she earned her BA and MS. Much of her work in education has focused on equitable and innovative environments.

Gordon Korman introduces himself as a regular guy who just happened to write 100 books for kids and adolescent readers. Born in Montreal in October of 1963, his writing career began in the seventh grade when he took English with his track coach. Then, he was challenged to write every day for more than four months and he finished his first novel, This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall! With his mother as his typist, he sent it to Scholastic and just like that, Korman was published as a freshman in high school. That was just the beginning. He has sold well over 30 million copies of his books, many translated in over 30 languages.

Currently, Gordon lives in Long Island outside of NYC where he continues to love visiting school, teachers, and driving his own children to wherever they need to be. His new book, The Fort, about a group of kids who stumble on an abandoned Cold-War-era bomb shelter, was released in summer 2022.

Allison Fallon is an eighth-grade teacher and Department Head at Central Middle School in Greenwich, CT. She has been teaching for 14 years, is an NWP teacher-consultant, and CWP graduate and teacher. In 2021 Allison was awarded the Distinguished Teacher Award for Greenwich Public Schools. When she’s not teaching or crafting curriculum, she is busy with her two daughters, husband, and guinea pigs exploring the outdoors, eating ice cream, and seeking new reading and writing adventures.

Gilly Segal grew up in Florida, and graduated from Hebrew University, and finally decided to call Decatur, Georgia home. By day, she’s the chief legal officer of an advertising agency. By night, she is a caped crusader! No, just kidding (she wishes). Her real not-so-secret identity is author. She’s been writing in one form or another since she wrote her first young adult novel–a Sunfire YA romance fanfic–typed out on an electric typewriter. Although she will confess it was titled CLAUDIA, she will neither confirm nor deny that any copies still exist. Whatever you do, don’t ask her mom if it’s in those boxes stored in the closet of her childhood room.

Kimberly Jones is an American author and filmmaker, known for the New York Times bestselling young adult novel, I’m Not Dying With You Tonight and for the viral video “How Can We Win” published during the George Floyd protest. The book, co-authored with Gilly Segal, was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in 2020. That same year, a seven-minute video featuring Kim using a Monopoly analogy to explain the history of racism and its impact on Black Americans went viral, being shared by Trevor Noah, LeBron James, Madonna, and more.

Charline Barger has taught middle and high school English for ten years and transitioned from a brick and mortar to a virtual setting two years ago. This year, she has had the pleasure of teaching creative writing for the first time. Charline has been a National Writing Project teacher-consultant for four years. She has been writing poetry, short stories, and picture books for as long as she can remember and aspires to write YA literature. She lives in Pace, FL with her boyfriend, three children, and a host of animals. When she is not teaching, Charline spends her time watching movies with her kids, reading the latest young adult novels, and chipping away at piles of manuscript drafts.

Rachel Ignotofsky is a New York Times Best Selling author and illustrator, based in Santa Barbara. She grew up in New Jersey on a healthy diet of cartoons and pudding and graduated from Tyler School of Art in 2011. Her work is inspired by history and science. She believes that illustration is a powerful tool that can make learning exciting. She has a passion for taking dense information and making it fun and accessible. Rachel hopes to use her work to spread her message about scientific literacy and feminism.

Bryan Ripley Crandall has an interesting story with technology, as he remembers vividly the envy he felt when his best friend, Peter Boy, got the first home computer of the neighborhood and, later, when his college classmates came to campus with clunky, but helpful, keyboard machines. He taught for over a decade in Louisville, Kentucky, and became part of the 21st cohort of the Louisville Writing Project. It was then he began thinking about the ways technology was shifting his own classroom instruction. In fact, he was first published in Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st Century Classroom, edited by Anne Herington, Kevin Hodgson, and Charles Moran. Ah, but he confesses that he knew little about the history of the computer until reading Rachel Ignatofsky’s book.

Join NWP Radio for a visit with author and NWP Writers Council member Pornsak Pichetshote. Pichetshote was a Thai-American rising star editor at DC’s Vertigo imprint where he worked on such comics perennials as The Sandman and Swamp Thing. His books have been nominated for dozens of Eisner awards—be it the award-winning Daytripper, the New York Times bestseller The Unwritten, or critical darlings like Sweet Tooth and Unknown Soldier. He left Vertigo to become an executive in DC Entertainment’s media team, where he started and oversaw DC TV’s department. He is the author of Infidel, his first major comics work as a writer, and his newest series The Good Asian which features police detective Edison Hark.

Join us for this episode of NWP Radio in which we will talk to Peter Docker, former member of the Royal Air Force, about his new book Leading from the Jumpseat.