TCU Summer Literacy Institute

Dr. Jonda C. McNair is the Charlotte S. Huck Endowed Professor of Children’s Literature. She specializes in literature intended for youth with an emphasis on books written by and about African Americans. She is a past chair of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards Committee and was a member of the 2019 Randolph Caldecott Award Selection Committee.

Dr. McNair served as chair of the 2021 John Newbery Award Selection Committee and is currently Immediate Past President of the Association for Library Service to Children. She is a former coeditor of the Journal of Children’s Literature and Language Arts, the journal of the Elementary Section of the National Council of Teachers of English.

Her work has appeared in journals such as Review of Educational Research, The Reading Teacher, Language Arts, Young Children, The Journal of Negro Education, and Children's Literature in Education. Dr. McNair is a former elementary school teacher of students in grades K-2.

The daughter of a printer, Carole Boston Weatherford was practically born with ink in her blood. She began writing at age 6 and soon after saw her poems in print. Her 80-plus books have garnered 2 NAACP Image Awards and 18 American Library Association Youth Media Awards, including a Newbery Honor, Coretta Scott King Award and 4 Caldecott Honors. Her career achievements have been recognized with the ALA Children’s Literature Legacy Award, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the Nonfiction Award from the Children’s Book Guild. The 2026-2026 Young People’s Poet Laureate and a retired HBCU professor, she lives in Baltimore.

Jeffery Boston Weatherford is an award-winning children's book illustrator and a rapper. His latest book, KIN: Rooted in Hope won a Coretta Scott King Honor and the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for Poetry. His debut book, You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen, was named an ALSC Notable Book and a best book of the year by National Council for the Social Studies and Kirkus Reviews. Jeffery's art has been exhibited in Washington, DC, Atlanta, Baltimore and North Carolina. Formerly a National Book Foundation teaching artist, he holds an M.F.A. from Howard University where he was a Romare Bearden Scholar.

Presentation sponsored by TCU Starpoint School.
Dr. Washington is a Professor in the School of Education at the University of California – Irvine (UCI). She is a Speech-Language Pathologist and is a Fellow of the American Speech Language Hearing Association.

Dr. Washington directs the Learning Disabilities Research Innovation Hub funded by the National Institutes of Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute on Child Health and Human Development. She is also director of the Dialect, Poverty and Academic Success Lab at UCI.

Currently, Dr. Washington’s research is focused on the intersection of literacy, language variation, and poverty. In particular, her work focuses on understanding the role of cultural dialect in assessment, identification of reading disabilities in school-aged African American children and on disentangling the relationship between language production and comprehension on development of reading and early language skills for children growing up in poverty.