Biographies

Rebeca Gamez

Rebeca Gamez is a doctoral candidate at The Johns Hopkins School of Education. Before entering the doctoral program, Rebeca taught 5th and 6th grade literacy in Trenton, New Jersey for three years. Before becoming a school teacher, she gained extensive experience in the realm of adult education and community organizing working with various non-for-profits in New York City. She taught English to emergent bilingual adults using critical pedagogies, specifically focusing on the language learning needs of Latino/a day laborers. She also assisted undocumented Latino/a day laborers fight against unpaid labor and unjust wages. Finally, she conducted education and training in both Spanish and English to support economic justice organizing in NYC neighborhoods.

As an interdisciplinary researcher, Rebeca’s work involves discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, sociology, and cultural psychology. Her current work ethnographically explores how schools in new destination regions, particularly those located in the “New South,” have responded to racial, ethnic, and cultural shifts as a result of increased immigration from Latin America and the impact these responses have had on students’ sense of belonging and academic engagement. Her work also examines inquiry-based STEM learning, with attention to students from non-dominant communities and emergent bilinguals. Her broader research interests include racial and ethnic relations between minority youth in urban schools, immigration, equity and social justice in science, literacy, and language learning, and culturally sustaining pedagogies. Rebeca received her M.A. in Education at Harvard University and her B.A. in Public Policy from the Woodrow Wilson School of International and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

Alexandra Diaz

The Only Road

Alexandra Diaz is the author of the 2017 Américas Award title, The Only Road, which also received the Pura Belpré Honor, and translated it into Spanish, El único destino. Her other novels for older teens include, Of All the Stupid Things (re-titled When We Were) which was an ALA Rainbow List book, and Good Girls Don't Lie. She has a MA in Writing for Young People from Bath Spa University in England. She teaches creative writing and circus arts in Santa Fe, NM, though not necessarily at the same time.

Nadia L. Hohn

Malaika's Costume

Nadia L. Hohn is the author of Malaika's Costume, a 2017 Américas Award Honorable Mention Title. Toronto-born of Jamaican parents, Nadia Hohn is an artist who self-expresses and works primarily in three genres-- writing, art, and music. These genres intersect throughout her work.

Nadia Hohn's first two non-fiction books Music and Media Studies were published as part of the Sankofa series by Rubicon Publishing in 2015. The series won the Moonbeam Children's Book Award for Multicultural Non-fiction in 2014. Nadia's first picture book Malaika's Costume was published by Groundwood Books in 2016. Nadia won the Helen Issobel Sissons Children's Book Award for the manuscript of "Malaika's Costume" in 2014. The sequel for Malaika's Costume (working title: Malaika's Smile) will be published in fall 2017. A French translation of Malaika's Costume will be published in spring 2017. She is currently editing her middle grade novel manuscript and researching biographies.

Nadia is passionate about diversity in the children's book industry. She wrote a feature opinion article called "Who Will Write Our Stories?" which was published in the Canadian Children's Book News in Fall 2014. She had a poem about Black Canadian films which was published in T-Dot Griots: An Anthology of Toronto's Black Storytellers in 2005. In January 2014, Nadia organized the first meeting of African-Canadian Writers for Children and Young Adults (ACWCYA), a collective that she set up to "talk, chat, vent, interact, share ideas/resources/pieces we're working on, give feedback, network with other writers who write in this very specific space, support, and inspire each other." The ACWCYA facebook page boasts 40+ members from all across Canada and the United States.

Reyna Grande

The Distance Between Us

Reyna Grande is an award-winning novelist and memoirist, and the author of The Distance Between Us, a 2017 Américas Award Honorable Mention Title. She has also received an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the Latino Book Award. In 2012, she was a finalist for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Awards. Her works have been published internationally in countries such as Norway and South Korea.

Her earlier novels, Across a Hundred Mountains, (Atria, 2006) and Dancing with Butterflies (Washington Square Press, 2009) were published to critical acclaim and have been read widely in schools across the country.

Born in Mexico, Reyna was two years old when her father left for the U.S. to find work. Her mother followed her father north two years later, leaving Reyna and her siblings behind in Mexico. In 1985, when Reyna was going on ten, she entered the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant. She later went on to become the first person in her family to graduate from college.

After attending Pasadena City College for two years, Reyna obtained a B.A. in creative writing and film & video from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She later received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Antioch University. Now, in addition to being a published author, she is also an active promoter of Latino literature and is a sought-after speaker at high schools, colleges, and universities across the nation.

Currently Reyna teaches creative writing at UCLA Extension and is at work on her next novel.

Fayette Colon

Fayette Colon is the Coordinator of Teacher Engagement and Professional Development for Teaching for Change. She has been a teacher in urban schools for the past six years. She grew up in the South Bronx and graduated from Columbia University with degrees in history and education. She was a founding teacher of Harvest Collegiate High School in NYC, where she taught about feminism, the prison industrial complex, and revolutions in Haiti and Cuba. Faye was also a founding teacher of a student organization that discussed how oppression impacts disciplinary systems in schools and the prison system.

At Harvest, she helped develop student-centered restorative practices and education programs, including an accountability process called Fairness. In 2016, Faye led a student trip to New Orleans to work with NOLA students and organizers to increase knowledge about the prison industrial complex, and ways to combat it using restorative practices in schools. For the past two years she has been working as a middle school Social Studies teacher in Washington D.C., focusing her instruction on the social inequalities of ancient civilizations.