Welcome to the NCTE event calendar! Here, you can find a list of events, including webinars, workshops, and in-person conferences. These events provide opportunities for English language arts teachers to learn new strategies and techniques, network with colleagues, and stay up-to-date on the latest research and best practices in the field.
If you have an event that you would like to submit to be included on the NCTE event calendar, please fill out the event submission form. To be considered, events must align with the mission of NCTE and be of professional interest to English language arts teachers. We hope to see you at one of our upcoming events!
If you’re hosting an event you’d like to share, submit your event here.
African American Read-In: Black Speculative Futures
African American Read-In: Black Speculative Futures
February 21, 2026 | University at Albany
The African American Read-In: Black Speculative Futures is a one-day University at Albany community gathering that invites faculty, staff, and students into a shared exploration of Black imagination, creativity, and future-making.
Building on the national African American Read-In initiative, this year’s program centers speculative thought broadly defined—moving beyond science fiction to include literature, illustration, performance, poetics, visual culture, and everyday acts of imagining otherwise. The day is designed as a collective journey, with moments of listening, making, witnessing, and celebration that reflect the intellectual and creative life of the UAlbany community.
The program features two featured talks that anchor the day’s intellectual arc. B. Sharise Moore opens the morning by situating Afrofuturism as both a cultural practice and a mode of inquiry, grounding participants in Black women’s futurity, speculative traditions, and creative resistance. Later in the day, Marcus Kwame Anderson expands our understanding of the speculative through illustrated narrative and visual storytelling, drawing from his work Big Jim and the White Boy to demonstrate how memory, history, and Black lived experience function as speculative practice beyond conventional genre boundaries.
Throughout the day, participants are invited to engage in creative workshops, communal read-ins, short-film screenings, and facilitated conversations, culminating in an evening showcase of readings, performance, sound, and visual work by members of the UAlbany community. These moments are designed to honor Black speculative traditions as living practices—rooted in history, responsive to the present, and oriented toward collective futures.
Faculty and staff are encouraged to attend alongside students not only as supporters, but as participants in a shared learning space. Students are invited as readers, makers, performers, and thinkers. Whether joining for a single session or spending the full day, all members of the UAlbany community are welcomed into a space that values imagination as a form of knowledge and creativity as a pathway to liberation.