Led by secondary educator and author Holly Spinelli, this cohort focuses on YA texts. Please see below for more information about the cohort members.
The cohort meets April 1, 2024 – August 15, 2024.
Meet the Cohort
Holly Spinelli is an advocate for inclusive, antiracist, anti-oppressive education. She teaches English at Monroe-Woodbury High School and Orange County Community College in New York. She has served on the NCTE Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English. Spinelli is a New York State English Council executive board member, the Voices of NYSEC blog editor, and an NCTE Open Educational Resources Fellow. She is a contributing writer for HITRECORD’s Emmy Award-winning series Create Together (2020), and her article “Our Américas: Writing beyond Borders: Latinx Voices in World Literature” received the NCTE Paul and Kate Farmer English Journal Award (2023).
Zack Arthur teaches English 11 and 12 at Marcellus High School in central New York, where he also advises the school art and literary magazine (The Wild Horses Review) and coaches the boys modified soccer team. Before this, he taught in Tupper Lake and Rochester. Outside of the classroom, he’s an avid reader and runner who will take any form of competition much too seriously.
Rachel DeTemple is a National Board-Certified Teacher and a 2017 BP Teacher of Excellence who has been teaching English for 26 years. She began teaching through the Mississippi Teacher Corps in 1998 and served three years in the Mississippi Delta before moving to Utkiagvik (Barrow), Alaska, to begin teaching at Barrow High School. She now lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, where she teaches Native American lit and serves as the librarian at Hutchison High School, a CTE-focused Public School of Choice. During her 23 years in Alaska as an educator, she has served on several state education committees and three English language arts curriculum committees, and has developed the Workplace Readiness Score as an employment tool for students in her school and her district. She is the author of Hamlet by William Shakespeare: The Know-It-All Version, with several other volumes in production for the Know-It-All Series. She’s also a fiddle player for Cousin Curtiss, Blackwater Railroad, and her own band, Fireweed Fiddle, which produced their first album, Orbiting Things, in 2023 with the aid of a grant from the Rasmuson Foundation. She lives with her husband and their sled dog team in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Topher Kandik teaches high school ELA at E. L. Haynes PCS. He is the winner of the Mayor’s Arts Award for Teaching English (2013) and the Washington, DC, Teacher of the Year (2016), and is a contributor to Arts Integration in Education (Intellect, 2016). When he does not have his nose in a book, ask him about his wife Allison, his 11-year-old son Theo, or his love for homemade fermentation.
Maggie Raymond teaches English IV AP/ADV Dual Credit classes at Bishop Lynch High School in partnership with Dallas College. She led a round-table discussion on developing student inquiry through reading and writing at the 2019 NCTE Annual Convention and participated on panels with the Margaret Atwood Society at the MLA Conventions in 2020 and 2022, as well as the 2021 PAMLA Convention. Most recently, she was published in the Margaret Atwood Studies journal discussing the role of memory as a survival technique for characters in Atwood’s writings. Outside the classroom, much of her personal reading focuses on young adult and/or popular fiction (with a weak spot for fantasy).
Andrew Torres, originally from Southern California, is a 10th-grade English teacher at Latino College Preparatory Academy in San Jose. While inspiring young minds in the classroom, Andrew is also furthering his education as a doctoral candidate in education. His dedication to fostering a diverse and inclusive learning environment was recently recognized with a DEI scholarship through the National Society for Leadership and Success. Outside of academia, Andrew enjoys collecting cards and taking the stage for stand-up comedy.