About
Us.

Jessica and Tonya met in 2011, teaching a student teaching class for future school librarians in New York City. They developed a curriculum that emphasized educational equity, since they were preparing students to work in one of the most diverse but also most segregated districts in the US. 

As a multi-racial teaching team, they quickly discovered they could cover more ground than either could manage on their own. Jessica, a white woman from the Midwest, and Tonya, a Black woman from Queens, could offer multiple perspectives on issues related to race, class, and culture and support each other in difficult conversations, as well as their students. 

Using stories from their own lives, cultural texts like movies, music, current events, and writings, Jessica and Tonya create unique learning experiences for groups that help them grow toward authentic anti-racist work. 

Since then, they’ve co- taught graduate courses, workshops, created professional development curricula for school districts, and helped professionals in publishing in the arts grapple with issues of race.

Learn more about their approach →

I grew up in a majority white upper-middle class suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, which is a pretty segregated city. Besides the Gateway Arch and Cardinals baseball, it’s famous for the question: where did you go to high school? With this one piece of information, St. Louisans can generalize your religion, the political affiliation of your parents, and how much money they made. In other words, we got by on a lot of assumptions.

As a kid, I had a lot of questions that I was scared to ask because when I did, adults got uncomfortable. So I turned to books. I loved reading as a kid, especially books by women authors. My family encouraged me, maybe because it kept me from talking so much.

After college, I got a job as a copy editor working for a CD Rom project (I know, #old), in the Afro-American studies department at Harvard. This job was a crash course in both the history and literature of the African diaspora and on the emerging field of educational technology. I was engaged and inspired by this work, and wanted to think more about the ways that all these new technologies were shaping society, and also our identities.

To explore these questions, I started graduate work at Columbia University’s Teachers College and began working with an afterschool program in nearby Harlem called HarlemLive. My desire for explicit talk about identity, especially the intersections of race, class, and gender fueled my doctoral studies.

At HarlemLive, I also began what would become lifelong work: my own personal work to comport myself as a white woman in a space designated for the empowerment of BIPOC teens, and building the language and skills to talk with other white people about identity and anti-racism.

For ten years, I worked at Pratt Institute’s iSchool where I prepared school librarians to work in NYC public schools, which felt like the perfect nexus of my interests in literacy and technology. My students and I had tough conversations that helped some students recognize their privilege for the first time.

In addition to academic work, I also consult with organizations like NYC Department of Education’s Office of Library Services, New Visions for Public Schools, and with Tonya. I stay connected to the library world as an adjunct at Syracuse University’s iSchool. And then of course there’s my other full-time gig as a parent to one of my greatest teachers: my daughter!

Learn more about Jessica →

I grew up in Queens, New York and was an avid reader. I was the kind of child that stashed books all around the house and slept with a flashlight near my bed so that I could continue to read long after bedtime. I loved to read and I also liked to write. I remember writing a story and my teacher mentioning that the character I created was blonde and white. In other words, not me. My teacher asked why I didn’t write a story about myself.

That’s when I realized that I had never read a book with a character that looked like me. I loved reading but I never saw myself as a character in my own stories. As I grew up I decided that I wanted to understand how to get more diverse characters into children’s books. That led me to publishing. But I also wanted to help teachers understand why it was so important for children to have windows and mirrors. That led me to teaching. Over the years, as I have researched and learned more about literacy and ideas of equity I have often talked to educators who assume that white children won’t read a book about Black characters--they won’t want to read stories that are not about them. I think it’s so odd. Children need to see themselves and others. That’s the beauty of books. They transport us to worlds beyond our own.

I’ve spent 20 years working in children’s publishing. I’ve written my own children’s books. But that wasn’t enough. I wanted to understand more about how we learn about race and so I went to New York University for my Ph.D in teaching and learning. In all my experiences, what I know for sure is that we need to talk about these things. 

We need to talk about race and children’s books. We need to talk about the texts that make up our worlds. We need to talk because talking is learning. We need to talk because silence is dangerous.  

Learn more about Tonya →