Kellee Moye and Ricki Ginsberg met while serving on the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award committee. They were reading and discussing hundreds of books, and they quickly became fast friends. Both were diehard attendees of the NCTE convention and ALAN workshop and loved presenting at conferences and learning from other educators. Their passion is to make engaging books accessible for teachers. One day, Kellee called Ricki and asked her if she wanted to be blog partners. She said she wanted to create a blog for educators and Kellee’s experience as a middle school teacher might complement well Ricki’s experience as a high school teacher. And that is how Unleashing Readers was born.
Kellee Moye is the current teacher-librarian at Hunter’s Creek Middle School in Orlando, Florida. She began teaching middle school in 2006: first as a sixth grade language arts teacher, then as a seventh grade language arts teacher, then as an intensive reading teacher for grades sixth through eighth as well as a developmental language arts class for new ELL students, and now she is the reading coach at her middle school in addition to teaching journalism and advanced reading. Beginning the 2019-2020 school year, Kellee moved to the role of teacher-librarian at her school.
Although she loves teaching in general, she has found a specific love for teaching reading. She enjoys working with all levels of readers: those who striving to find their love of reading or improve their reading ability because it is so rewarding and thoroughly enjoyable to transform these students’ views of reading, school, and learning as well as working working with advanced readers by enriching their reading experience is equally gratifying and enjoyable! As a classroom teacher, she believed that the biggest key to helping these students is community which includes class discussions, student-centered learning, and, most importantly, helping each student find the specific books they’ll love and time to read these books.
As teacher-librarian, all of her beliefs from the classroom moved with her to the library where she advises a group of students called Student Literacy Leaders who are like mini-librarians and are one of the keys to her school’s literacy success. She also enjoys working with all students of the school and with other teachers to help them reach all readers with great books and literacy instruction. Kellee also advises the Future Problem Solvers club, is a literacy leader at her school, and a member of her school’s professional leadership team. Her school is a 1:1 digital school.
Outside of her classroom, Kellee’s passion remains education and reading. Kellee is the ALAN President elect and is so excited to head ALAN December 2023 to November 2024 and host the ALAN 2024 workshop. She is the author of various teaching guides including for Candlewick, Chronicle, Abrams, Cake Literary, and various authors. She attends the ALAN Workshop and the ALA Annual convention whenever she can, as well as the state library conference, FAME. It is through these conventions, organization memberships, and through Twitter that she has built her professional repertoire which includes recent activities such as being a member of ALA’s 2020 Schneider Family Book Award Jury and was the co-chair of the Jury for the 2021 award; presenting at NCTE 2012-14, 2016-19, and 2023; reviewing for The ALAN Review; serving on the ALAN (Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the NCTE) Board of Directors for the 2016-2018 term; serving as the ALAN social media coordinator 2015-2020; and being a member of the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award committee from 2011-2015 (where Ricki and Kellee met) including chairing the committee in 2014.
Kellee is a homebody who loves to spend time with her family, she’ll mention them often in IMWAYR and other posts. She loves being a mom, reading (obviously!), watching TV, her pets, talking to her family on the phone (they are all too far away!), hanging out with friends, Pokémon, Animal Crossing, LEGO, and going to Disney or Universal!
Ricki Ginsberg is Associate Professor of English Education at Colorado State University. She formerly taught high school English for six years in Vernon-Rockville, Connecticut. There, she designed and implemented two courses, Young Adult Literature I and II. Her mission was to help students learn about young adult literature in a warm, welcoming setting. Hundreds of students signed up for the course, and they devoured and discussed thousands of books. She is a strong advocate for allowing students choice in their reading materials to allow them to take ownership of their reading lives.
Every year, Ricki participates in a lot of great conferences including AERA’s annual conference and NCTE’s annual convention. She particularly loves NCTE’s ALAN Workshop (www.alan-ya.org). This conference is for educators, librarians, authors, and publishers who are interested in working to increase awareness of the power of young adult literature. Ricki was the 2020 President of ALAN, and has served as a member of the ALAN Board, as an ALAN consultant, and as a member of the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award Committee (three years as a member, one year as chair, and one year as past-chair). For five years, Ricki was Assistant Editor of The ALAN Review, a scholarly journal dedicated to young adult literature.
Ricki’s research interests rest in integrating diverse texts and pedagogical practices in schools and the recruitment and retainment of teachers of color. Her work has published in journals like Teachers College Record, Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, English Journal, Voices from the Middle, The ALAN Review, Journal of Human Rights, Journal of Adolescent Research, and Multicultural Perspectives.
She and her co-editor Wendy J. Glenn published the book Engaging with Multicultural YA Literature in the Secondary Classroom: Critical Approaches for Critical Educators (Routledge, 2019).
Her second book, Challenging Traditional Classroom Spaces with YA Literature: Students in Community as Course Co-Designers (National Council of Teachers of English, 2022).
Please contact us at unleashingreaders@gmail.com or on Twitter @unleashreaders for any inquiries about us or Unleashing Readers.
Hi ladies! My mom sent me a link to your wonderful page, and to your Top Ten Characters You’d Like to Have Lunch With. May I say how thrilled I am that Miss Movado made your list!! Thanks for thinking of her – and for including her in such esteemed company.
Best – Cecilia
Cecilia,
Thank you so much for stopping by! We’re honored that your mom found us and that she shared our page with you.
🙂 Kellee
Hi there!!
Kelle, I read a review you did for a book titled “Now is the Time for Running” I do literature circles with my class and do a war theme. I use Breadwinner, Torn Apart (A Dear Canada diary), The Sky is Falling, and Camp X. I teach grade 6 and I saw in your review that “Now is the time for running” is appropriate for Grade 7. I am going to read the book, but I was wondering if you think it’s too mature for grade 6?
Thank you so much!!
Maureen, It is going to be a personal choice. It has hard parts in it, but so does Breadwinner. It would be a great book for your lit circles if you think it is appropriate for your kids. 🙂
Hello,
Does your blog review products or do sponsored posts? If so how much
do you charge?
Amber Crow
7204 W 27th St. Suite 220 St. Louis Park MN 55426
Tomoson.com
Sage Adderley of Sage’s Book Tours gave me your link and said you might be interested in a blog post from me. As a teacher and author I’d love to share some ideas that teachers might find useful. I wrote my latest book, Warrior Kids, specifically for teachers to utilize with students. Please let me know if you’re interested and the specs you require. I’ve been looking at some of your posts and they are almost like lesson plans. Is that your focus? Is there a length requirement? I look forward to hearing from you. Take care!
Hi, Michael! Congratulations on your new book! We’ve sent you an email. Enjoy your week!
Hello, I run a very small children’s book imprint in England called Pudding Press under the umbrella of Patrician Press. Would you like to see any of our children’s books? We publish fiction, early readers and picture books. You can see more here: http://patricianpress.com/pudding-press/
I look forward to your reply.
Greetings,
You did a wonderful review of my book Good Morning Yoga and I would like to send on my new release Meditate with Me: A Step by Step Mindfulness Journey (Dial Books for Young Readers) for your consideration. Thank you!
Hi,
Hope you’re well! Just wanted to ask if you accept outside content contributors, because I would love to pitch you some ideas if so.
I’m a contributing author for a new homeowners site, and I’m looking for opportunities to write more actively for other sites as well.
Are you the right person to contact about this?
Thanks,
Maricel
Hi Kellee, I am a missionary serving in Uganda. I have been creating a Language Development curriculum for schools here. i came across your lesson plans for the Hat Trilogy (books by Jon Klassen), and was delighted. I would like to use this lesson plan set and not disturb your copyright, but in order to use it there must be some adjustments made for African relevance. How can this be done? If I were to get permission from you to make the adjustments, could I still give the credit to you for creating the lesson plans and just mention that it is edited for Africa?
How can I register on your website and receive updates and newsletter and be part of the community?
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Hello, Mrs. Moye!
I obviously found out this site as you told us about it in book club. I don’t want to reveal who I am, but I’m pretty sure you can figure it out. Anyways this site seems amazing, and I just wanted to say that you are amazing and all of us from HCMS Book Club really adore you and your book recommendations! Stay safe, and I miss you a lot these days!
PS: Hi Trent!
Yours truly,
City of Bones lover
Excellent source! Thank you for all your good work. We CAN provide excellent and important content online as long as we need to in order to keep our students safe. “See” you at ALAN (What a year!!)
Hi,
I was featured contributor February 2018 for my middle grade fantasy MONA LISA’s GHOST. My new book, THE GRAVITY THIEF was published in July 2020 and i would love to contribute again with an updated article about the exhilaration of writing Fantasy for middle graders.
Thanks
Nancy
Hello,
My name is Alexander Fernandes, I’m looking for guest posts Sites, and blogs.
I recently came across your blog and found it very interesting.
The article is related to your website and will be appreciated by your readers.
I guarantee you that the article will be 100% unique, top quality and Copyscape protected and will not be shared with any other site.
Please let me know if this sounds good to you so that we can send the article to you for review.
Hope to have a positive response.
—
Best Regard, Alexander
Chinese class: I took Chinese at school as a freshman. On one particular day, we didn’t have anything to do in class since we had gone through the whole curriculum for the semester. Our teacher wanted us to watch a Chinese movie in that free time, and I just so happened to watch one recently on YouTube. I offered to find it, and my teacher let me use her computer, that was connected to a Promethean board so that the whole class could see what I was doing on the screen. After a couple of minutes of searching, I couldn’t find the movie since I didn’t know the exact title, so I logged into my YouTube account and decided to find it in my history. When I opened my history I was mortified since stupid me had forgotten that being the awkward virgin that I was at the time I had searched up tutorials on kissing and making out that previous night. The whole class was hysterically laughing, my teacher was extremely confused, and I almost cried as I scrolled past all the kissing tutorials and finally found the movie. I went back to my seat and didn’t speak to anyone in class for the rest of the week. I still haven’t lived it down. More stories here https://hideuri.com/dAPMw7