Dr. Alfred Tatum, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Metropolitan State University of Denver, is a foremost expert on the literacy development of African American boys. He has authored more than 75 publications on the topic. He wrote the award-winning book, Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the Achievement Gap in 2005. His second book, Reading for Their Life: (Re) building the Textual Lineages of African American Adolescent Males was published in 2009. His third book, Fearless Voices: Engaging a New Generation of African American Adolescent Male Writers, was published in 2013. A fourth book, Teaching Black Boys in the Elementary Grades: Advanced Disciplinary Reading and Writing to Secure Their Futures was released by Teachers College Press in December 2021. He is also the author on four major reading and writing programs used with millions of students throughout the US. Dr. Tatum has lectured at many of the top universities in the US. He continues to provide professional development support in elementary, middle and high schools throughout the US. Dr. Tatum began his career as an eighth-grade teacher in Chicago. He currently serves as Vice President of the Literacy Research Association.

As a child of immigrants and first-generation graduate, she has over 13 years of experience as an Arts Leader in OC and received over $100K in grants for her art projects. She’s the founder of Barrio Writers, LibroMobile and Crear Studio — all art programs initiated as a response to build cultural relevance and equity for BIPOC folks in her community. As of 2020, her community projects collectively established the LibroMobile Arts Cooperative (LMAC). In 2010 Congressman Lou Correa honored her with the “Women Making a Difference” award and in 2011 she was awarded for “Outstanding Contributions to Education,” by the OC Department of Education. She obtained a M.F.A. in Creative Writing with a cognate in Media Studies in May 2015. In 2016, García was awarded for SanTana’s Fairy Tales multi-media exhibition, which was supported in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation. In 2018, she was honored as an Emerging Artist at the 19th Annual OC Arts Awards. In 2019, she was recognized as an inaugural ASU Desert Nights, Rising Stars Fellow, and recipient of the UH Katherine G. McGovern College of the Arts-Project Row Houses Fellowship. Over the last two years, she served as a California Arts Council (CAC) panelist, managed over $6M in arts education funding and co-wrote the new CAC Individual Artist Fellowship Grants as an arts program specialist. Currently, she splits her time writing and implementing Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA) strategic framework for art spaces, teaching Ethnofiction for Contemporary Narratives, and developing an archival ethnofiction project for the life of Modesta Avila as a 2020 USLDH Mellon-Funded Grantee — she gives credit to her parents’ GED education and the migrant labor that brought her grandparents to the US as the source of her perseverance and foundation to her accomplishments.

From the time I could read and write, I, well, read and wrote. When I was really young, I wrote rhyming poems, clearly reflecting my activist bent as the daughter of young MASH unit surgeon who had been sent away for a year to Vietnam, a bent I’d re-find later in life as an activist, and which produced the talented likes of: Stop All Wars! People fighting, bighting [sic] too, This is enough I think don’t you? Heh. Not so bad for an 8 year old. As I got older, I switched to free verse, writing lots of angsty love poems with rainbow water colors decorating them (a voice I would abandon soon after college, and finally revisit as an author in THE MEMORY OF THINGS, writing the bird girl’s part in fragmented, poetic thoughts). In college and post college, I continued to write creatively, taking creative writing workshops at Gotham Writers Workshop in NYC and expanding from poetry to short stories, but in all of it, I never once thought about becoming a writer. Let’s just say it was beyond my wildest dreams. In 1988, I applied to law school, and after I graduated, I practiced family law (and still continue to!), got married and had my first son. Only when I was pregnant with my second son, did I realize how much I missed the creative side of myself and began work on a novel -- one that I never actually thought I could write, and took me five years to complete. That manuscript got me a fancy NYC agent, but never sold to a publisher, nor did the one I wrote after it. But the third one -- a poignant little story I wrote for my sons, originally called Steinbeck, The Scoot, and the Pull of Gravity, about what it means to be a family (in all its difficult messiness), first love, and the true meaning of friendship -- sold to the legendary Frances Foster at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, as the Bank Street Award winning THE PULL OF GRAVITY (2011). The rest, as they say, is a very checkered history. Which is why, in addition to visiting schools to talk about my books, I also share presentations on rejection and perseverance, and what it means to succeed in the arts.