Keynote Presenters

Harvey “Smokey” Daniels
Friday, February 26, 2010 ~ 8:00-9:00 a.m.

Harvey “Smokey” Daniels has been a city and suburban classroom teacher, and now serves as professor of reading, language, secondary education, and interdisciplinary studies at National-Louis University in Chicago. In language arts, Smokey is best known for his work on student book clubs, as recounted in Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups, and his new title, Minilessons for Literature Circles.

Smokey is also the co-author of Subjects Matter: Every Teacher’s Guide to Content-Area Reading, which shows how students can better understand and remember what they read in science, math, and social studies, as well as in English classes. Bringing together recent comprehension research with practical classroom strategies, Subjects Matter shows how schools can grow lifelong readers across the curriculum. Smokey also co-wrote A Community of Writers, which describes a balanced writing program, blending strong teacher-directed lessons with genuinely student-driven workshops.

Throughout the Center for City Schools, Smokey works with a network of fifteen improving elementary schools in Chicago. In 1996, he co-founded the city’s first new high school in thirty years, named for and designed on the principles outlined in his book, Best Practice: New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America’s Schools. The growth of the school—along with an explicit template for any high school’s growth—is described in Rethinking High School: Best Practice in Teaching, Learning and Leadership. The book, along with its companion video, is used around the country by district and school teams working on major, long-term change strategies.

Smokey’s keynote address is titled, “Inquiry is Back.”

Firoozeh Dumas
Friday, February 26, 2010 ~ 12:00-1:00 p.m.

Firoozeh Dumas was born in Abadan, Iran and, in the 1970’s, moved to Southern California with her family. She later attended UC Berkeley where she met and married a Frenchman. Firoozeh grew up listening to her father, a former Fulbright Scholar, recount the many colorful stories of his life in both Iran and America. In 2001, with no prior writing experience, Firoozeh decided to write her stories as a gift for her two children.

Funny in Farsi was on the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists and was a finalist for the PEN/USA award in 2004 and a finalist in 2005 for an Audie Award for best audio book (she lost to Bob Dylan). She was also a finalist for the prestigious Thurber Prize for American Humor (she lost to Jon Stewart), and is the first Middle Eastern woman ever to be considered for this honor.

Critics and readers of all ages have loved her stories. Jimmy Carter called Funny in Farsi “A humorous and introspective chronicle of a life filled with love—of family, country and heritage.” Orange County Reads One Book selected Funny in Farsi as its book of the year for 2004, as did the city of Whittier in 2005 and the cities of Cape Ann, MA and Palo Alto, CA in 2006. Funny in Farsi is now on the California Recommended Reading List for grades 6 – 12, and is used in many junior high schools, high schools, and universities. Her commentaries have been broadcast on NPR and published in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and Lifetime Magazine. In April 2005, Firoozeh’s one-woman show, “Laughing Without an Accent” opened in Northern California to sold out audiences and ran at Theatreworks in Mountain View, California in 2006.

For the past five years, Firoozeh has traveled the country reminding us that our commonalities far outweigh our differences…and doing so with humor. She has spoken in conferences, schools, churches, Jewish Temples, and Islamic centers. Her travels have taken her from the East Coast to the West Coast, from Harvard University to UCLA. Everywhere she has gone, audiences have embraced her message of shared humanity and invited her back for more. Firoozeh Dumas’s latest memoir, entitled Laughing without an Accent, was published in May 2008.

The title of Firoozeh’s keynote address is “Shared Humanity through Humor.”

Jack Gantos
Friday, February 26, 2010 ~ 7:00-8:00 p.m.

Jack Gantos was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania. He remembers playing a lot of “pass the chalk” in Mrs. Neiderheizer’s class in first grade. He was in the Bluebird reading group, which he later found out was for the slow readers. To this day, he’d rather be called a Bluebird than a slow reader. His favorite game at that time was playing his clothes were on fire and rolling down a hill to save himself.

When he was seven, his family moved to Barbados. He attended British schools, where there was much emphasis on reading and writing. Students were friendly but fiercely competitive, and the teachers made learning a lot of fun. By fifth grade he had managed to learn 90 percent of what he knows to this very day.

When the family moved to south Florida, he found his new classmates uninterested in their studies, and his teachers spent most of their time disciplining students. Jack retreated to an abandoned bookmobile (three flat tires and empty of books) parked out behind the sandy ball field, and read for most of the day. His greatest wish in life is to replace trailer parks with bookmobile parks, which he thinks will eliminate most of the targets for tornadoes and educate an entire generation of great kids who now go to schools that are underfunded and substandard.

The seeds for Jack’s writing career were planted in sixth grade, when he read his sister’s diary and decided he could write better than she could. He begged his mother for a diary and began to collect anecdotes he overheard at school, mostly from standing outside the teachers’ lounge and listening to their lunchtime conversations. Later, he incorporated many of these anecdotes into stories.

In junior high he went to a school that had been converted from a former state prison. He thinks the inmates probably fled for their lives once the students showed up. Again, he spent most of his time reading on his own.

In high school he decided to become a writer. But he would have to wait another three years, until he went to college, before he could actually meet other writers and study with teachers who thought writing amounted to more than just cribbing book reports and composing sympathy notes.

While in college, he and an illustrator friend, Nicole Rubel, began working on picture books. After a series of well-deserved rejections, they published their first book, Rotten Ralph, in 1976. It was a success and the beginning of Jack’s career as a professional writer. This surprised a great many people who thought he was going to specialize in rehabilitating old bookmobiles into housing for retired librarians.

Jack continued to write children’s books and began to teach courses in children’s book writing and children’s literature. He developed the master’s degree program in children’s book writing at Emerson College and the Vermont College M.F.A. program for children’s book writers. He now devotes his time to writing books and educational speaking.

His publications can take a reader from “cradle to grave”—from picture books and middle-grade fiction to novels for young adults and adults.

Jack is known nationally for his educational creative writing and literature presentations to students and teachers. He is a frequent conference speaker, university lecturer, and in-service provider. From his Rotten Ralph picture books, to his Jack Henry short stories, to his Joey Pigza novels and his autobiographical Hole in my Life, Jack shows that, when it comes to writing books, there are two essential thoughts to keep in mind: all writing is personal, and all forms of writing are related to each other through their fundamental elements and structure. In his keynote address, “It is All Personal,” Jack will look at how every idea you have can find just the right form to best reveal the fullness of a story.

Jim Burke
Saturday, February 27, 2010 ~ 8:00-9:00 a.m.

Jim Burke teaches English at Burlingame High School. He is the author of numerous books, including The English Teacher’s Companion; Writing Reminders; Tools for Thought; Illuminating Texts: How to Teach Students to Read the World; Reading Reminders; and I Hear America Reading: Why We Read What We Read.

He is also the author of The Reader’s Handbook; Academic Workouts; School Smarts: The Four Cs of Academic Success; and ACCESSing School: Teaching Struggling Readers to Achieve Academic and Personal Success. His newest book is Letters to a New Teacher.

Jim has received many awards, including the NCTE Intellectual Freedom Award, the NCTE Conference on English Leadership Award, and the California Reading Association Hall of Fame Award. He served on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Committee on Adolescence and Young Adulthood English Language Arts Standards and recently worked with ACT on their high school English Language Arts standards.

He is a highly regarded national speaker on topics such as developing students’ academic literacy, helping struggling readers succeed in school, and helping teachers find personal and professional balance.

Jim’s keynote address is entitled “Revising English for a Brave New World.”