Junot Díaz is the winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. His fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His critically praised, bestselling debut book, Drown, led to his inclusion in Newsweek’s “New Faces of 1996”–the only writer in the group. The New Yorker placed him on a list of the twenty top writers for the twenty-first century. Born in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic, and raised there and in New Jersey, Díaz graduated from Rutgers University and received an MFA from Cornell University.
Among the awards Díaz has received are a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Díaz lives in New York City and Boston, and is a tenured professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Díaz will be speaking at the Thursday General Session at 6:30 p.m.
Julie Andrews is one of the most recognized figures in the world of entertainment best known for her performances in Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music and, more recently, The Princess Diaries. Julie is the author of many beloved children's books, including Mandy and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, and her recent bestselling memoir, Home. Visit the Julie Andrews Collection online at www.julieandrewscollection.com.
Emma Walton Hamilton is a bestselling children's book author, editor, educator and theater arts professional. She has co-authored and published 16 books for children and young adults, four of which were New York Times bestsellers. Emma is the coauthor of the I Can Read! DUMPY easy readers series with her mother, Julie, and illustrated by her father, Tony Walton.
Andrews and Hamilton will speak at the Friday General Session at 8:00 a.m.
Over his long career, Kidder’s writing has been prolific and outstanding. The Soul of a New Machine–a book celebrated for its insight into the world of high-tech corporate America–earned him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1982. Other bestselling works include House (1985), Among Schoolchildren (1989), Old Friends (1993), and Home Town (1999). His enormously influential book Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003) captures two global health crises, tuberculosis and AIDS, through the eyes of Dr. Paul Farmer, a single-minded physician bent on improving the health of some of the poorest people on the planet. Kidder’s most recent book, My Detachment, is an extraordinarily honest account of his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam.
Born in New York City in 1945, Kidder spent his childhood in Oyster Bay, Long Island, where his father was a lawyer and his mother a teacher. He earned a BA from Harvard University in 1967; from June 1968 until June 1969, he served as a lieutenant in Vietnam, for which he was awarded a Bronze Star.
Kidder obtained his MA from the University of Iowa, where he participated in Writers’ Workshop. It was there Kidder met Atlantic Monthly Contributing Editor Dan Wakefield, who helped him get his first assignment for the magazine as a freelance writer. Kidder’s articles in The Atlantic have covered a broad array of topics, including railroads, energy, architecture, and the environment.
Tracy Kidder’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The New York Times Book Review, and The New York Times OpEd page. Kidder lives with his wife in western Massachusetts and Maine.
Kidder will speak at the Saturday General Session at 8:00 p.m.
“Sailing over the Edge: Navigating the Uncharted Waters of a World Gone Flat”
Columbus, of course, didn’t actually sail over the edge of the earth, though he sailed over the horizon, the edge that terrified his sailors because, as the ancient maps warned, “beyond here there be dragons,” or, worse, the end of earth, an abyss, a nothingness into which his three small ships would plummet. Over that edge, although they didn’t vanish into the abyss, the waters were uncharted and the land undiscovered, but Columbus must have had confidence that some basic principles would hold. The wind would still drive the boat forward, the rudder would still turn it away from the rocks, and the anchor would still hold it fast when they came to . . . well, wherever it was they finally came to.
So it is with education, looking into the next decades. We’ve already sailed with dragons – all the social upheavals of the last 50 years, the technology evolving faster than we could have imagined, the economic, political, and international chimeras and monsters of the last 10 years – but we haven’t sailed educationally into nothingness and we know that, despite the unpredictable future we face, we do have basic principles that will hold true. We have to take confidence in them, be ready to adapt them to new circumstances, put a lookout in the crow’s nest, and sail on over the edge.
Thomas Friedman announced in 2006 that the world is flat once again. “In the future,” he said, “how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them,”[1] reminding us of a principle that may have faded into the background as we have been pushed by NCLB and other forces toward accountability measured by neatly bubbled exams. Now, at the edge, we need students who know how to think, solve problems, create solutions, share widely, listen intently, and act ethically.
Indeed, we float on the edge of uncharted waters, of barely imagined possibilities for our students and the future they must navigate. The direction we take from here will determine that future and the destinations that await us. But if our teaching is flat, our understanding insubstantial, and the experiences we offer students one-dimensional, we will fall into old ways and old results. I believe we have the tools, the knowledge, and the heart to sail bravely into that world of educational possibility, and if we do, our students will learn, will think, and will envision even more possibilities along the way. In this Presidential Address, I will discuss what tools, knowledge, and heart I believe are required for success in this world gone flat.
Beers will deliver her Presidential Address during the General Session at 10:00 a.m.
[1] Friedman, T. 2006. The World Is Flat (Updated and Expanded). Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 301.
“Affiliates: Learning from the Past, Living the Present, and Launching the Future” is the theme for this year’s Affiliate Roundtable Breakfast. NCTE Vice President Yvonne Siu-Runyan will talk briefly on “Teachers Matter; Affiliates Matter.”
The breakfast gives affiliate leaders and other NCTE members the opportunity to discuss issues of mutual concern. The breakfast also serves as a forum for the recognition of state, regional, and national affiliate activity. Affiliates and individuals will be recognized with awards for excellence, leadership development, membership growth, recruitment of teachers of color, intellectual freedom, multicultural programs, and publications, including journals, newsletters, and websites.
Siu-Runyan will speak at the Affiliate Breakfast on Saturday, November 21, at 7:00 a.m.
Breakfast Co-chairs:
Patricia Schall, College of St. Elizabeth, Morristown, NJ
Connie Nagel, Pleasant Valley Junior High School, Pleasant Valley, IA
Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator and New York Times bestselling author Brian Selznick graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with the intention of becoming a set designer for the theater. However, after spending three years selling books and designing window displays for a children’s bookstore in Manhattan, he was inspired to create children’s books of his own. His books have received many awards and distinctions, including a Caldecott Honor for The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins and a Robert F. Sibert Honor for When Marian Sang.
Selznick travels extensively to research his books. He spent six months in Washington, D.C., for Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride; he traveled to England for The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins; and he visited Walt Whitman’s childhood home in West Hills, New York, for Walt Whitman: Words for America. More recently, he visited the city of Paris three times to research his newest book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.
Selznick will be speaking at the Books for Children Luncheon on Saturday, November 21, at 12:30 p.m.
Karen Smith is associate professor of Language and Literacy at Arizona State University. Prior to her tenure at ASU, she was associate executive director for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) where she carried out board policy; developed professional development programs and publications to enhance literacy teaching at elementary and middle school levels; and worked to influence public policy related to literacy education. Smith’s research interests include children’s literature as a way of knowing; critical literacy in elementary language arts; and teacher research as professional development. All of her research is conducted in collaboration with classroom teachers in urban settings.
Smith will speak at the Elementary Section Get-Together on Thursday, November 19, at 4:30 p.m.
Jerry Pinkney is one of America’s most admired children’s book illustrators. He has won five Caldecott Honor Medals, six Coretta Scott King Awards and Honors, four New York Times Ten Best Illustrated Awards, and many other prizes. His artwork has been exhibited in museums throughout the country, and he has served on the National Council on the Arts and the U.S. Postal Service Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee. His newest book, Sweethearts of Rhythm, is a masterful portrait of an influential all-female swing band. Pinkney lives with his wife, author Gloria Jean Pinkney, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
Marilyn Nelson is a three-time National Book Award Finalist, and winner of numerous other awards, including a Newbery Honor Medal and Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Carver: A Life in Poems, a Coretta Scott King Honor for Fortune’s Bones, and a Printz Honor for A Wreath for Emmett Till. Her newest book, Sweethearts of Rhythm, is illustrated by Jerry Pinkney and told in thought-provoking poems that take an unusual, deep, and inspiring look at our nation’s history. Nelson lives in East Haddam, Connecticut, where she is professor of English at the University of Connecticut.
Pinkney and Nelson will be speaking at the Children’s Literature Assembly Breakfast on Sunday, November 22, at 7:30 a.m.
Gordon Korman is the author of more than sixty books for children and young adults. His writing career began at the age of twelve when his seventh-grade English assignment became his first novel, which was then published while he was a freshman in high school. Now, he is a full-time writer, with more than fifteen million copies of his novels in print. His books have been translated into fourteen languages. Each year he travels extensively, visiting schools and libraries, bringing his trademark humor and adventure style to readers everywhere.
Korman will speak at the Middle Section Luncheon on Friday, November 20, at 12:30 p.m.
Cris Tovani taught elementary school for ten years before becoming a high school reading specialist and English teacher. In addition to teaching full-time, she is a nationally known consultant focusing on issues of reading and content comprehension in the high school classroom. Cris has also worked for many years as a staff developer for the Denver-based Public Education and Business Coalition (PEBC), the consortium that has received national acclaim for its work in reading comprehension reform. She is the author of the books I Read It, but I Don’t Get It and Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?
Tovani will speak at the Middle Section Get-Together on Thursday, November 19, at 4:30 p.m.
Laurie Halse Anderson is the author of the multiple-award-winning novel Speak, widely considered to be one of the most important books for young adults published in recent years, as well as Catalyst, Prom, Twisted, and the recent New York Times bestseller Wintergirls. In 2008, Anderson received the ALAN Award for outstanding contribution to the field of adolescent literature; she was awarded the 2009 Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Library Association. She lives in northern New York State with her husband.
Anderson will speak at the ALAN Breakfast on Saturday, November 21, at 7:00 a.m.
A distinguished and prolific writer with a writing career that spans 25 years, Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, literary criticism, and essays. Oates’s writing has earned her much praise and many awards, including the National Book Award for the novel them, the 2004 Fairfax Prize for lifetime achievement in the literary arts, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the O. Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story. She has been nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
Oates will speak at the Secondary Section Luncheon on Saturday, November 21, at 12:30 p.m.
Having worked as a librarian and bookseller, Pearl's knowledge of and love for books is unmatched. In 1998, she developed the program “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book,” which spread across the country. The former Executive Director of the Washington Center for the Book, Pearl celebrates the written word by speaking across the country and on her monthly television program “Book Lust with Nancy Pearl.” She is also the author of Book Lust and More Book Lust. She is a regular commentator about books on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." Pearl lives in Seattle with her husband Joe.
Pearl will speak at the Secondary Section Get-Together on Thursday, November 19, at 4:30 p.m.
Author, teacher, consultant, and speaker, Laura Robb has published more than 16 books on reading and writing, including Differentiating Reading Instruction and Assessments for Differentiating Reading. Robb has also coauthored materials for students such as Reading Advantage and The Reader's Handbook. She served a three-year term on NCTE's Commission on Reading from 2003–2006. Robb taught for 43 years and annually returns to the classroom for 8 to 10 weeks. Presently she coaches teachers in Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and Michigan. She is revising Teaching Reading in Middle School and working on a book titled Teaching Middle School Writers.
Robb will be speaking at the Conference on English Leadership Luncheon on Sunday, November 22, at 11:30 a.m.
Lorene Cary is a respected writer, dedicated educator, cultural leader, and social activist. She is the author of FREE! (2006), a collection of real-life Underground Railroad stories for young readers; the novels The Price of a Child (1995) and Pride (1998); and the bestselling memoir Black Ice (1992); and is currently at work on a fifth book, Blackface. A Senior Lecturer in creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, Cary is the founder of Art Sanctuary, a nonprofit organization that uses the power of African American art to transform individuals, and to unite and enrich groups of people. For her writing and arts activism, Cary was awarded her city’s highest civic honor, the Philadelphia Award. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, Time, Essence, Mirabella, O, and other publications. She is president of the Union Benevolent Society. Cary lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the Rev. Robert C. Smith, and daughters Laura and Zoë.
Cary will speak at the College Section/CCCC Luncheon on Saturday, November 21, at 12:30 p.m.
Anne Ruggles Gere is Gertrude Buck Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Sweetland Writing Center and serves as co-chair of the Joint Ph.D. in English and Education. She also directs NCTE’s Squire Office of Policy Research. Recipient of a number of awards, including the University of Michigan Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award, she has published 10 books and over 50 articles on literacy-related topics including writing groups, extracurricular literacy practices, and high-stakes writing tests. She is a former Chair of CCCC and a past president of NCTE; she currently serves on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association.
Gere will speak at the College Celebration on Friday, November 20, at 7:00 p.m.
Gene Luen Yang began drawing comic books in the fifth grade. He began publishing under the name Humble Comics in 1996. In 1997, he got the Xeric Grant for Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks. In 2007 his graphic novel American Born Chinese became the first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award and the first graphic novel to win the American Library Association's Printz Award. It is now in print in over ten languages. Yang’s latest book (created with Derek Kirk Kim) is The Eternal Smile.
Yang teaches computer science at a Catholic high school in Oakland, California. He lives in Fremont, California, with his wife and children.
Yang will speak at the Conference on English Education (CEE) Luncheon on Friday, November 20, at 12:30 p.m.
Featured Speaker—Jeff Kinney
Jeff Kinney was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2009 for his work on Diary of a Wimpy Kid. In 1998 he started writing down ideas for Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which he hoped to turn into a book. Jeff worked on the book for six years before publishing it online daily installments. To date, the online version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid has had more than 70 million visits, and is typically read by more than 70,000 kids a day. In 2006, Jeff signed a multi-book deal with publisher Harry N. Abrams to turn Diary of a Wimpy Kid into a print series. Diary of a Wimpy Kid was released in April 2007 and quickly became a New York Times bestseller, eventually reaching the #1 spot. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules was released in January 2008 and also became a #1 bestseller. The Diary of a Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself Book came out in October of 2008. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw was released in January of 2009 and became the #1 bestselling book in the country. The fourth book, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days, released on October 12, 2009, debuting at #1 on all national bestseller lists.
Kinney will be speaking on Saturday, November 21, at 11:00 am in the Marriott/Liberty Ballroom Salon A, 3rd floor.
Featured Speaker—Nicholas Sparks
Nicholas Sparks wrote his first novel during the summer of 1985 while recovering from a sports injury. It was never published. In 1989, while living in Sacramento, he wrote a second novel, also unpublished. He worked a variety of jobs over the next three years, and in 1990, collaborated on a book with Olympic Gold Medalist Billy Mills, titled Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Understanding. Sparks followed it with The Notebook (1994), Message in a Bottle (1998), A Walk to Remember (1999), The Rescue (2000), A Bend in the Road (2001), Nights in Rodanthe (2002),The Guardian (2003), The Wedding (2003), Three Weeks with My Brother(2004), True Believer (2005) and At First Sight (2005). Sparks lives in North Carolina with his wife and children.
Sparks will be speaking on Saturday, November 21, at 4:15 pm in the Marriott/Grand Ballroom Salon F, 5th floor.