Shirley Climo is a children’s author whose extensively researched books of folklore include Cinderella and Cinderlad stories from Egypt, Korea, Ireland, and Persia. Her other folklore books include Atalanta’s Race: A Greek Myth; The Little Red Ant and the Great Big Crumb: A Mexican Fable; Stolen Thunder: A Norse Myth; Treasury of Mermaids: Mermaid Tales from Around the World; and A Treasury of Princesses: Princess Tales From Around the World.
Frances Ann Day is a specialist in multicultural children’s literature. She is author of Multicultural Voices in Contemporary Literature: A Resource for Teachers; Latina and Latino Voices in Literature for Children and Teenagers; and Lesbian and Gay Voices: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Literature for Children and Young Adults.
Alan Dundes is a professor Anthropology at U. C. Berkeley and international expert on the interpretation of folklore. He holds the 1994 distinguised teaching award from UC Berkeley. His other professional awards and fellowships include fellowships from Guggenheim and NEH and the Sigillo d’Oro award for lifetime achievement in folklore. He has authored, co-authored and edited more than 30 books and over 200 articles on folklore topics ranging from flood myths and fairy tales to studies of sick humor.
Karen Greene is a Ph.D. candidate in medical anthropology and a Cambodia specialist in a joint program with U. C. Berkeley and University of California San Francisco. Her dissertation, “Child Rights in Cambodia: Negotiating the Local Transnational Context” looks at transnational perspectives on childhood, children’s rights and parent-child relationships.
Marianne Halpin is head librarian at San Francisco Day School. She is also in the graduate program in International & Multicultural Education at San Francisco University.
Meena Khorana is editor-in-chief of Bookbird, the Journal of International Children’s Literature. Dr. Khorana is also a professor specializing in multiculturalism in the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University. She has authored and edited a number of books and articles on international children’s literature including, The Indian Subcontinent in Literature for Children and Young Adults: An Annotated Bibliography of English-Language Books.
Jennifer Jones-Martinez is an ESL teacher and reading specialist at Lorin Eden School K-6 school in Hayward, California. She has had extensive experience in Spanish-speaking bilingual as well as English dominant classrooms.
Amma A. B. Oduro is Program Representative for the Center for African Studies and holds an M.A. in Linguistics with a concentration in ESL. She has taught ESL with a focus on literacy for several years. Ms. Oduro spent the last three years doing cultural outreach programs at schools, conferences and festivals around the state of Colorado as member of an African dance troupe. She has family in Ghana.
Martha Saavedra is the associate director of the Joint Berkeley Stanford African Studies Center coordinating outreach activities since 1993. As a political scientist Dr. Saavedra has written on agrarian policies in Sudan and currently on women in sports in Senegal and other African countries. Away from her desk, she coaches soccer and voluteers in her son's elementary school.
Audrey Shabbas is founder of AWAIR (Arab World and Islamic Resources), a Berkeley-based organization providing curriculum products and expertise for teaching about the Arab World as a geographic region and about Islam as a world faith.
Teresa Stojkov is vice-chair of the Center for Latin American Studies and professor of Spanish language and literature at U. C. Berkeley. Before coming to U. C. Berkeley, Dr. Stojkov worked with the Classroom In A Can project at the Smithsonian Institite in Washington D. C., designing teaching materials for the museum’s Teaching With Objects and Museum Collections program.
Junko Yokota is a professor of Multicultural Literature K-12 at National-Louis University in Chicago and co-author of Children’s Books in Children’s Hands. Born in Japan, Dr. Yokota came the United States to attend college. She was an elementary school teacher for ten years before earning a Ph.D in Reading Education with a minor in children s literature and library science. Dr. Yokota is immediate past-president of the U. S. national section of International Board on Books for Young People (USBBY) and served as a member of the 1997 Caldecott Award Committee of the American Library Association.
Glen Worthey is completing a dissertation in U. C. Berkeley's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures tentatively called "Author, Authority, Authoritarian: The Russian Child from Tolstoy to Stalin." He has taught courses in Russian language, literature and culture, and Anglo-American children's literature, all at Berkeley, and leads regular seminars on music, world cultures, and take-apart (please ask!) as a volunteer at his daughter's elementary school. He is currently head of the Humanities Digital Information Service in the Stanford University Libraries.
Sharon Zinke is a Reading Specialist for the Hayward Unified School District. For over 10 years she has provided inservice on literacy acquisition to schools, parents and professional organizations throughout the state.