Kid Lit and Young Adult Reads

Joel Christian Gill is the Inaugural Chair of Boston University’s Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Narrative and Associate Professor in the CFA School of Visual Arts. He is also a cartoonist and historian who speaks nationally on the importance of sharing stories. He is the author of the acclaimed memoir Fights: One Boy's Triumph Over Violence, cited as one of the best graphic novels of 2020 by The New York Times and for which he was awarded the 2021 Cartoonist Studio Prize. He wrote the words and drew the pictures for Fast Enough: Bessie Stringfield’s First Ride and the award-winning graphic novel series Strange Fruit: Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History, as well as 3 volumes of Tales of The Talented Tenth, which tell the stories of Bass Reeves, Bessie Stringfield and Robert Smalls. His newest work is the graphic novel of Ibram Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Ten Speed Press 2023).Gill h as dedicated his life to creating stories to build connections with readers through empathy, compassion and, ultimately, humanity. He received his MFA from Boston University and his BA from Roanoke College.

Kathryn Hulick is a freelance journalist who covers AI and computing for Science News and Science News Explores. She's also the author of books for young people or anyone who is curious. Her book The UFO Files (Quarto, 2025) combines a sci-fi story with scientific explanations of the marvels found on board an alien spacecraft. Her book Welcome To The Future (Quarto, 2021) is about how technology could change the world, and Strange But True (Quarto, 2019) uses critical thinking to explore the science behind paranormal mysteries.

Tony Keith Jr., PhD is an award-winning Black American gay poet, spoken word artist, and Hip-Hop educational leader from Washington DC. Or, you can just call him an “Ed Emcee”. He is the debut author of How the Boogeyman Became a Poet and Knucklehead (February 2025), both published by HarperCollins. A multi-year fellow of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Tony has featured performances at John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington National Cathedral,  Historic Lincoln Theatre, Bus Boys & Poets, and in schools and communities around the world including South Africa, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago and many more. His poem Black Man On Fire won first prize in the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest and his performance of Code Switched is featured in the award-winning documentary series Talking Black in America and published in the book Centering Possibility in Black Education. He is a former cultural center director at Penn State University and University of North Carolina Charlotte, and served as an adjunct professor and academic advisor at the University of the District of Columbia and the University of Maryland College Park (UMD). Tony is co-author of the award-winning book Open Mic Night: Campus Programs that Champion College Student Voice and Engagement.

Gloria Muñoz is a Colombian American writer, translator, and advocate for multilingual literacy. She is the author of This is the Year, Your Biome Has Found You, and Danzirly, which won the Ambroggio Prize and the Gold Medal Florida Book Award. Her other honors include an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, Hedgebrook Fellowship, being a Macondista, Highlights Foundation’s Diverse Verse Fellowship, Lumina’s Multilingual Writing Award, and a part of Las Musas. She is proud to be St. Pete's first Latina poet laureate. Through Moonlit Música, a bilingual media company she co-founded, she writes narrative scripts and songs for children, adolescent, and adult programming. Notable clients include The New York Times, Comedy Central, hulu, Rebel Girls, Apple tv, Google, FX, and Hatch, for which she has developed beloved sleep story characters, including Mari Mariposa, a bilingual butterfly with a passion for community building.

Tiffany Jewell is a Black biracial writer, twin sister, first generation American, cisgender mama, anti-bias antiracist (ABAR) educator, and consultant. She is the author of the #1 New York Times and #1 Indie Bestseller, This Book Is Anti-Racist, a book for young folks and everyone to wake up, take action, and do the work of becoming antiracist and The Antiracist Kid: A Book About Identity, Justice, and Activism. Tiffany is currently working on multiple book projects for readers of all ages. Her latest book, Everything I Learned About Racism I Learned in School (2024) focuses on the experiences Black and Brown students face as a direct result of the racism built into schools across the United States.

Kai Harris is a writer and educator from Detroit, Michigan, who uses her voice to uplift the Black community through realistic fiction centered on the experiences of Black girls and Black women. Kai's publication credits include Guernica, Lit Hub, The Everygirl, and The New York Times Book Review. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, What the Fireflies Knew, won the 2023 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Fiction, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and was selected as a Marie Claire Book Club pick, amongst other honors. In addition to fiction, Kai has published poetry, personal essays, and peer-reviewed academic articles on topics related to Black girlhood and womanhood, the slave narrative genre, motherhood, and Black identity. A graduate of Western Michigan University’s PhD program, Kai was the recipient of the university’s Gwen Frostic Creative Writing Award in Fiction for her short story, “While We Live.” Kai now resides in the Bay Area with her family, where she loves to hike and visit the beach—and where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Santa Clara University.

Priya Huq is a Bangladeshi Texan cartoonist living in New York who speaks widely on issues related to the comics industry, art, race, culture, identity and their intersections. Her appearances include the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Emerald City Comic Con, and New York Comic Con. In her talks, Priya focuses on practical advice for marginalized artists and cartoonists. Audiences will learn how trauma affects an artist's brain and techniques for creating after trauma. Priya is an outspoken voice in the conversation around diversity in comics and her work explores race and multiculturalism in America. Priya draws and writes diverse comics, often in watercolor for all ages on a variety of topics and genres. Her comics work has been featured in The Nib, as well as in anthologies such as Habibi: A Muslim Love Story Anthology and Dirty Diamonds. Priya's first book, Piece by Piece: The Story of Nisrin's Hijab (Abrams ComicArts, 2021), is a young adult graphic novel featuring a fourteen-year-old girl, Nisrin, who begins to grapple with her cultural identity and sense of place in the world after a racist assault.

Layla F. Saad is the author of the ground-breaking Me and White Supremacy, an anti-racism education workbook that was initially offered for free in an Instagram challenge and in a self-published digital workbook in 2018 (downloaded by 100,000 people in the space of six months). Me and White Supremacy debuted on the New York Times and USA Today bestsellers lists. It is also an Amazon, Wall Street Journal, Indie, and Pacific Northwest bestseller. Most recently, she has adapted it for young adult audiences. Layla is an East African, Arab, British, Black, Muslim woman who was born and grew up in the West, and lives in the Middle East. Layla has always sat at a unique intersection of identities from which she is able to draw rich and intriguing perspectives. Her work is driven by her powerful desire to become a good ancestor; to live and work in ways that leave a legacy of healing and liberation for those who will come after she is gone.

A graphic novelist and Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California-Irvine, Sherine Hamdy speaks nationally and internationally on the role of comics as a teaching tool and on social justice and representation in comics. She has led a seminar at Seattle Children’s Hospital, delivered the keynote address at DePauw University’s undergraduate conference in Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, and spoke on about social justice and comics at St. John’s University and Swarthmore. Sherine writes out of a desire to contribute to more honest depictions of Arab and Muslim Americans. Her young adult graphic novel, Jabs, illustrated by Myra El-Mir (forthcoming) tells the coming-of-age story of an Egyptian-American girl living in Long Island and struggling with her first year of college. In 2017, she published a graphic novel co-authored with Coleman Nye called Lissa: A Story of Friendship, Medical Promise, and Revolution (University of Toronto/EthnoGRAPHICS). This story draws on Sherine’s work on Muslim ethics and health care practices in Egypt, as well as Coleman Nye's research on women in the U.S. who test positive for the BRCA cancer gene.