Literacy Summit

2025 Mebane Early Litearcy Summit – TBD

2024 MEBANE Literacy Summit scheduled for April 27

UNC Charlotte and the Cato College of Education are home to the Mebane Early Literacy Center which will host the literacy summit. The 2024 Mebane Literacy Summit is scheduled for April 27, 2024 at UNC Charlotte. SAVE THE DATE and we will have more information soon!

Register here by April 11, 2024.

2024 Keynote Speaker

Junious ‘Jay’ Ward is a poet and teaching artist from Charlotte, NC. He is a National Slam champion (2018), an Individual World Poetry Slam champion (2019), author of Sing Me A Lesser Wound (Bull City Press 2020) and Composition (Button Poetry 2023). Jay currently serves as Charlotte’s inaugural Poet Laureate and is a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Ward has attended Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo, The Watering Hole and Tin House Winter Workshop. His work can be found in Columbia Journal, Four Way Review, DIAGRAM, Diode Poetry Journal and elsewhere.

2023 Charlotte Literacy Summit

The 2023 Charlotte Literacy Summit was held on April 22, 2023 in the Cato College of Education at UNC Charlotte. Below is an archival copy of the program.

  • Download full schedule with breakout session information with links to presentation slides where provided by presenters

2023 Keynote Speaker

Alicia D. Williams is the author of Genesis Begins Again, which received the Newbery and Kirkus Prize honors, was a William C. Morris prize finalist, and won the Coretta Scott King–John Steptoe Award for New Talent. Alicia D also debuted a picture book biography, Jump at the Sun: The True Life Tale of Unstoppable Storycatcher Zora Neale Hurston. And followed up with Shirley Chisholm Dared: The Story of the First Black Woman in Congress. Recently, she published The Talk, which is a recent Coretta Scott King Author Honor winner about ! The Talk is about that very difficult conversation far too familiar to so many Black and Brown Americans.

Alicia shares a passion for storytelling which stems from conducting school residencies as a Master Teaching Artist of arts-integration. Alicia D infuses her love for drama, movement, and storytelling to inspire students to write. She resides in Charlotte, NC.

Questions & Information

Please email us at reading-programs@uncc.edu for questions and information.