Featured Speakers KWAME ALEXANDER is a poet, educator,
publisher, and New York Times bestselling author of 35 books, including Swing, Becoming Muhammad Ali, co-authored with James Patterson, Booked, which was longlisted for the National Book Award, Rebound, which was shortlisted for prestigious UK Carnegie Medal, the Caldecott Medal and Newbery Honor-winning picture book, The Undefeated, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, and, his Newbery medal-winning middle grade novel, The Crossover. A regular contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition, Kwame is the recipient of numerous awards, including The Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, The Coretta Scott King Author Honor, three NAACP Image Award Nominations, and the 2017 Inaugural Pat Conroy Legacy Award. In 2018, he founded the publishing imprint VERSIFY, and opened the Barbara E. Alexander Memorial Library and Health Clinic in Ghana, as a part of LEAP for Ghana, an international literacy program he co-founded.
KATHERINE APPLEGATE is the Newbery Medal-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author of numerous books for young readers, including The One and Only Ivan, the Endling series, Crenshaw, Wishtree, the Roscoe Riley Rules chapter books series, and the Animorphs series. She lives with her husband, who writes as the author Michael Grant, and their children in California.
MELISSA GILBERT starred as Laura Ingalls
Wilder on the hit NBC television show Little House on the Prairie. She has starred in numerous movies and plays, and served two terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild. She is the author of Prairie Tale, Daisy and Josephine, and My Prairie Cookbook. At TLA 2022, Melissa will discuss her new book, Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered, a hilarious and heartfelt memoir chronicling her journey from Hollywood to a ramshackle house in the Catskills during the COVID-19 pandemic Author, illustrator, and filmmaker VASHTI HARRISON is the illustrator of the New York
Times bestselling book Hair Love and the author and illustrator of Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History. She has a background in cinematography and screenwriting and a love for storytelling. She earned her BA from the University of Virginia with a double major in Media Studies and Studio Art with concentrations in Film and Cinematography. She received her MFA in Film and Video from CalArts where she rekindled a love for drawing and painting. Now, utilizing both skill sets, she is passionate about crafting beautiful stories in both the film and kidlit worlds.
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JERRY HAWKINS is the Executive Director of
Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (DTRHT), part of a national 14-place initiative by The W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Dallas TRHT’s mission is to create a radically inclusive city by addressing race and racism through narrative change, relationship building, and equitable policies and practices. Jerry is also a cofounder of The Imagining Freedom Institute (The IF Institute), a national research-based leadership group that helps organizations and institutions understand the historical context to contemporary issues of place, race, and racism. Jerry was formerly the Project Director of Bachman Lake Together for The Dallas Foundation and Zero To Five Funders Collaborative, an early childhood collective impact initiative in Dallas, and Director of Children’s Services at the Wilkinson Center in East Dallas/Southeast Dallas.
JENNIFER HORNE is the Business,
Economics, and Government Information Librarian at the University of Kentucky. In this role, she supports the schools of business, public policy and administration, and diplomacy. She also serves as the library’s forward-facing contact for government information. Prior to joining the University of Kentucky, she spent more than twenty years in public policy research and legislative affairs for organizations that represent state and local officials, including the Council of State Governments, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. She earned her Master’s in Information Science from the University of Tennessee, a Master’s in Legislative Affairs from George Washington University, and a Bachelor’s degree in politics and Spanish from Washington & Lee University.
AISHA JOHNSON, Assistant Professor/
MLS Program Director for the School of Library and Information Sciences at North Carolina Central University is a revelator of Southern library history. She is committed to archival research, the production of minority librarians and archivists for cultural preservation and redefining the scholar. Johnson stands on a soapbox for unveiling the history of underrepresented communities. She has focused much of her research on the development of literacy in the African American community and philanthropic efforts to develop public libraries in the South. Her advocacy for librarianship and archives is not only conveyed in her research, but also her professional career. In 2020, she was dubbed Distinguished Alumni of Florida State University’s College of Communication and Information, School of Information. In 2021, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History recognized her work and impact with the Freedom Scholar Award.
