Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is an activist, scholar, cultural critic, and one of America's leading hip-hop generation intellectuals.  His work, covering topics such as popular culture, politics, sexuality, education, and religion, has appeared in numerous journals, magazines, books, and anthologies.  He has lectured widely and provides commentary for media outlets which include NPR, The Washington Post, Essence Magazine, and The New York Times.

Hill is currently a political contributor for Fox News Channel, appearing regularly on programs such as The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes.  Prior to joining Fox News, Hill was a regular guest on CNN, MSNBC, and CourtTV.  An award-winning newspaper columnist and blogger, Hill's writing can be found in Metro Newspapers, TheRoot.com, and BarbershopNotebooks.com.  Most recently, he can be seen as host of Our World with BLACK ENTERPRISE.

Since his days as a youth in Philadelphia, Hill has been a social justice activist and organizer.  He is a founding board member of My5th, a nonprofit organization devoted to educating youth about their legal rights and responsibilities.  Hill also works closely with the ACLU Drug Reform Project, focusing on drug informant policy.  Hill also works directly with African American and Latino youth.  In 2001, he started a high school literacy project, using hip-hop culture to increase school engagement and reading skills.  He also continues to organize and teach adult literacy courses for high school dropouts in Philadelphia and Camden.  In 2005, Ebony Magazine named him one of America's "Top 30 Black Leaders Under 30 Years Old."

Hill is the author of Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity and the co-author of Media, Learning, and Sites of Possibility.  He is currently completing You Ain't Heard it From Me: Snitching, Rumors and the Politics of Other People's Business in Hip-Hop America and the Anthropology of Education Reader.

Hill is an Associate Professor of English Education and Anthropology at Columbia University.  He also holds an affiliated faculty appointment in African American Studies at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University.  Trained as an anthropologist of education, he holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) from the University of Pennsylvania.  Hill's academic research focuses on the intersections between youth culture, identity, and educational processes.

Of his keynote topic, "Remixing the Canon: Hip-Hop Literacies in the 21st Century," Marc writes, "Over the past thirty years, hip-hop culture has become a central feature of both youth culture and American popular culture.   During this time, English educators have paid considerable attention to the pedagogical possibilities of hip-hop culture in the classroom."  In this address, Marc will outline a "hip-hop pedagogy" for the English literature classroom and show how an approach to curriculum and pedagogy that draws upon hip-hop culture's unique aesthetics, tropes, and worldviews can create new sites of possibility for teaching, engaging, and learning from our youth.

Dr. Jeffrey Wilhelm is an internationally-known teacher, author, and presenter.  A classroom teacher for fifteen years, Dr. Jeffrey Wilhelm is currently Professor of English Education at Boise State University.  He works in local schools as part of the Professional Development Site Network, and teaches middle and high school students each spring.  He is the founding director of the Maine Writing Project and the Boise State Writing Project.

Jeff has authored or co-authored eighteen texts about literacy teaching.  He has won the two top research awards in English Education: the NCTE Promising Research Award for "You Gotta BE the Book"  and the Russell Award for Distinguished Research for "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys."  In 2010 he was named a Literacy Hero in Adolescent Literacy by Scholastic Publishers.

He has worked on numerous materials and software programs for students and has edited a series of one hundred books for reluctant readers entitled The Ten.  Jeff enjoys speaking, presenting, and working with students and schools.  He is currently researching how students read and engage with non-traditional texts like video game narratives, manga, horror, fantasy, etc., as well as the effects of inquiry teaching on teachers, students, and learning.  His website can be found at jeffreywilhelm.com.

In his interactive keynote, "From BEING the Book to BEING the change: Teaching for Love and Wisdom--The Real 21st Century Literacies" Jeff will explore how the teaching of literary response and composing in a context of inquiry can cultivate joy and wisdom in ourselves and our students.   We will explore how to cultivate wisdom through literacy-wisdom as becoming increasingly more conscious of interconnectedness (between people, between groups, and between people and creation); developing reflexivity (i.e., a profound respect for others and other perspectives); cultivating compassion; being guided by a greater good than materialism, status, and image; valuing stillness and reflection-and seeking guidance from an inner versus outer locus of control; developing inner awareness of one's own perceptions, motivations, possibilities and agency; and a commitment to service and social action for a communitarian good.

D.J. MacHale is a writer, director, executive producer and creator of several popular television series and movies.  As an author, his ten-volume book series, Pendragon: Journal of an Adventure through Time and Space, became a New York Times #1 bestseller.

His filmmaking career began in New York where he worked as a freelance writer/director making corporate videos and television commercials.  D.J. broke into the entertainment business by writing several ABC Afterschool Specials. As co-creator of the popular Nickelodeon series, Are You Afraid of the Dark? he produced all ninety-one episodes over eight years.  D.J. also wrote and directed the movie Tower of Terror for ABC's Wonderful World of Disney, which starred Kirsten Dunst and Steve Guttenberg.  The Showtime series Chris Cross was co-created, written and produced by D.J.  It received the CableAce award for Best Youth Series.  D.J. co-created and produced the Discovery Kids/NBC television series Flight 29 Down.  He wrote every episode and directed several.  His work on Flight 29 Down earned him the Writers Guild of America award for "Outstanding Children's Script" and a Directors Guild of America award nomination.  Other notable writing credits include the ABC Afterschool Special titled Seasonal Differences; the pilot for the long-running PBS/CBS series Ghostwriter; and the HBO series Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective, for which he received a CableAce nomination for writing.

In print, D.J. has co-written the book, The Tale of the Nightly Neighbors, based on his own teleplay, and penned the poetic adaptation of the classic Norwegian folk tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon.  He is currently writing three new book series: Morpheus Road, a spooky trilogy; The Equinox Curiosity Shop, a fantasy adventure; and The Monster Princess, a picture book.

D.J. lives in Southern California with his wife Evangeline and daughter Keaton. They are avid backpackers, scuba divers and skiers. Rounding out the household are a Golden Retriever, Maggie; and a Kitten, Kaboodle.

Of his keynote topic, D. J. writes, "I'm a professional writer who has done everything in his power not to write.  Starting from school until this very morning, writing has proven to be sublime torture.  Writing this speech is a perfect example.  I'd much rather be outside playing with my dog.  However, I have also been cursed.  I am a storyteller.  Though the act of sitting down and staring at a blank computer screen makes me twitch with discomfort, I can't turn off the thought process that is constantly conjuring tales of adventure and mystery.  If only they could write themselves!"

"Such is the lament of many writers.  The irony for me is that the choices I made early on to try and avoid writing put me squarely onto a path that led me to become a writer.  Oops!  Though I didn't realize it at the time, starting as far back as junior high, I was developing the tools that would help me bring my stories to life.  My talk will be about a journey I didn't realize I was taking and about the challenge of balancing the pain of the process with the satisfaction that comes with the result."

Troy Hicks is a professor of English at Central Michigan University and directs the Chippewa River Writing Project, a site of the National Writing Project.  There he teaches writing methods courses and offers professional development workshops on the teaching of writing, writing across the curriculum, and writing with technology.  In his research, Troy collaborates with K-16 teachers and explores how they implement newer literacies in their classrooms. He has been listed as one of the Tech & Learning 100 @ 30, which recognizes students doing ground-breaking work in edtech, young entrepreneurs shaping the future of edtech, and those teachers changing classrooms around the nation. 

Troy is the author of The Digital Writing Workshop (Heinemann 2009), and the publisher of the Digital Writing, Digital Teaching blog that explores the variety of issues related to teaching writing with new media for K-16 teachers and teacher educators.

Of his secondary keynote address, "Teaching the iGeneration: Because Digital Writing Matters," Troy writes, "Without question, writing continues to change in the twenty-first century. Teachers, administrators, parents, and other stakeholders value the teaching of writing-and see that our very notion of what it means to be literate is evolving-yet continue to wonder how best to teach writing in a digital age.  Based on work with the National Writing Project, we will discuss practices that hold promise as we develop understandings of what it means to write digitally, create spaces for digital writing in our schools, and extend assessment practices that account for the complexities of writing in a digital world."

Penny Kittle has taught grades three through graduate school in six states.  As a professional development coordinator for the Conway, New Hampshire, School District, Penny acts as a K-12 literacy coach and directs new-teacher mentoring.  In addition, she teaches writing at Conway's Kennett High School and in the Summer Literacy Institutes at the University of New Hampshire and speaks on literacy issues throughout the United States and Canada.

Penny is the author of four books with Heinemann-Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing, which won the 2009 James N. Britton Award from NCTE; Inside Writing, coauthored with Donald H. Graves; The Greatest Catch; and Public Teaching-and she is a Heinemann Professional Development Provider.

Of her keynote address, "Learning Journeys in a GPS World," she writes, "I believe we must create conditions in our classrooms where voyages in reading and writing open up possibilities for children of all abilities and interests. We will consider a better balance between leading students and following them as we explore rich experiences with reading, writing, and thinking in one boy's life through five years of elementary school."