Speakers
Opening Speaker: Yvette Manns
As a professional development facilitator, educator, and literacy specialist, Yvette Manns has dedicated more than a decade to improving educational practices in early childhood education.
Yvette has collaborated with hundreds of teachers, administrators, and school district leaders across the country through direct coaching, professional development sessions and creating video resources for training. Yvette is a children’s book author, penning the popular book, HBCU Proud, Cityrela and more. She has also has a phonics series which includes, The Not-So-Lazy Schwa. These books can be found in over 10,000 classrooms in the US, Canada and Australia. Manns creates educational curriculum for children ages 5 – 12 under the pen name “The Lit Teacher”.
Yvette serves as a public speaker to a variety of educators, public health workers, parents, and community leaders on how to immerse children in language and the importance of authentic representation in children’s literature.
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Keynote Speaker: Derrick Barnes
Derrick Barnes is a National Book Award Finalist for his 2022 graphic novel Victory. Stand! -Raising My Fist For Justice, which also won the 2023 YALSA Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction Award, and a Coretta Scott King Award Author Honor. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed, multi-award-winning picture book Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut which received a Newbery Honor, a Coretta Scott King Author Honor, the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award, and the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers.
In 2020, he became the only author to have won the Kirkus Prize twice for his twelfth release, the New York Times bestseller I Am Every Good Thing. The title also won a Charlotte Huck Award (NCTE), and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honor.
Derrick is also the creator of the New York Times Bestselling companion picture books, The King of Kindergarten (2019) and the Queen of Kindergarten (2022).
He is a graduate of Jackson State University (BA-Marketing ’99) and was the first African American male creative copywriter hired by greeting cards giant Hallmark Cards. Derrick is a native of Kansas City, MO, but currently resides in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his enchanting wife, Dr. Tinka Barnes, and their four sons, the Mighty Barnes Brothers.
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