Recipients of the Children's Literature Assembly Early Career Award
2025 CLA Early Career Award Recipient
Rachelle Kuehl
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Rachelle Kuehl is a visiting assistant professor in the School of Education at Virginia Tech where she teaches courses in literacy, social foundations of education, elementary education, and rural education. She is a former first-grade teacher and a 2022 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellow whose research examines how children’s literature can be a vehicle for social justice by engendering empathy and empowerment among young readers. Rachelle’s most recent projects involve studying the intersectional identities both represented and constituted in middle grade novels set in rural places. Rachelle is the author or co-author of six book chapters and more than 20 articles in publications such as the Journal of Children’s Literature, Journal of Literacy Research, The Reading Teacher, Research in the Teaching of English, English Journal, Journal of Advanced Academics, Phi Delta Kappan, and the Journal of Research in Rural Education. |
2023 CLA Early Career Award Recipient
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Josh Coleman is an Assistant Professor of English Education in the University of Iowa’s College of Education. Broadly, his scholarship advocates for the use of intersectional LGBTQ+ youth literature within contexts of teaching and learning. His current project seeks to document the rapid increase in book bans across the US, and this project is funded by the National Academy of Education through a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. Entitled “Banned Childhoods,” this study traces how regional contexts shape book bans of LGBTQ+ and BIPOC youth literature and documents the bottom-up educational activism resisting those bans. Finally, Josh was formerly a high school English teacher in the Deep South, where he is from, and in Paris, France, where he served as a Fulbright Scholar.
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2019 CLA Early Career Award Recipient
Noreen Naseem Rodríguez
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Noreen Naseem Rodríguez is an assistant professor of elementary social studies in the School of Education at Iowa State University. Her research interests include elementary educators of color, the teaching of difficult histories, critical uses of diverse children’s literature, and the histories and educational experiences of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Iowa. Rodríguez was a bilingual elementary teacher in Texas for nine years and her work has been published in scholarly journals such as Theory & Research in Social Education, Educational Studies, The Urban Review, and The Journal of Children’s Literature as well as in practitioner journals including Literacy Today and Social Studies and the Young Learner. |
2017 CLA Early Career Award Recipient
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Angie Zapata, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Language, Literacy and Culture at the University of Missouri . She is a longtime elementary teacher of bilingual and multilingual children and now teaches undergraduate, masters, and doctoral courses focused on language, literacy, identity, and literature for children and youth in both online and face-to-face settings. Angie engages in collaborative teacher and researcher methodologies to understand how students and their teachers respond to diverse literature and how literature reflecting diverse languaging practices can mentor students' translingual literacy practices and text-making processes. Her most recent publications can be found in Research in the Teaching of English, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts, Language Arts, and the Journal of Children’s Literature in addition to other journals and edited books.
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Angie Zapata
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