Stergios Botzakis is a professor of adolescent literacy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His areas of expertise are content-area literacy, media literacy, and popular culture. He teaches classes on content area literacy, working with struggling adolescent readers, and theoretical models in education research. His research is about using alternative texts and media in school, with a focus on graphic novels and comics. He blogs about graphic novels at Graphic Novel Resources.
Julia Watts is the author of over a dozen novels for adult and young adult readers. Her young adult novel Finding H.F. won the 2002 Lambda Literary Award in the Children’s/Young Adult category, and her 2018 young adult novel Quiver was an Indie Awards finalist, a VOYA Perfect 10 Award winner, and a Southeastern Independent Booksellers’ Association Okra Pick. Julia is a member of the East Tennessee Writers’ Hall of Fame and recently won the Tennessee Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Award. She is currently in the PhD program with a concentration in Literacy Education and a specialization in Children’s and Young Adult Literature.
Cammie Jo Lawton is a doctoral student in the Literacy Studies program with a specialization in Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Cammie is a Graduate Assistant for the Center for Children’s and Young Adult Literature under Susan Groenke. Her research interests focus on the connections between young adult literature, empathy building, and spiritual/religious formation and exploration. Prior to enrolling at UTK, Cammie taught amazing sophomores at West High School in Knoxville, TN.