Webinars & Events: 2024-2025
Upcoming Events
Jessica Lander, Author of Making Americans: Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas, and Inspiration in Immigrant Education and Winner of the 2024 George Orwell Book Award
Wednesday, June 4, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. CT
English Honor Societies is partnering with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) to provide this experience to our communities.
Jessica Lander is a teacher, author, and advocate who teaches history and civics to recent immigrant students in a Massachusetts public high school. A 2021 Global Teacher Prize Top 50 Finalist and the 2023 Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year, she has taught in the US, Thailand, and Cambodia. She is the author of Making Americans (Beacon Press, 2022), a deep look at immigrant education, and co-author of Powerful Partnerships (Scholastic, 2017). Her work on education has appeared in The Boston Globe, Education Week, and The Washington Post. Jessica also consults on state and national education policy and co-founded the We Are America Project, supporting over 1,500 students in telling their stories of American identity.
Presented by:
Chris Lockwood, NEHS Director
Past Events
Bradley Sides, Author of Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood
Wednesday, May 7, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. CT
Bradley Sides is the author of two short story collections, Those Fantastic Lives and Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood. His fiction appears at BULL, Ghost Parachute, Necessary Fiction, Psychopomp, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. His stories have been nominated for Year’s Best Weird Fiction and featured on LeVar Burton Reads. Additionally, he has written reviews, interviews, and essays for Chapter 16, Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, The Rumpus, and Southern Review of Books. In 2019, he was selected to participate in Lit Hub’s “Secrets of the Book Critics.”
Presented by:
Chris Lockwood, NEHS Director
Michael Penna, NEHS Advisory Council
Sigma Tau Delta Pays You Back: Scholarships and Internships
Thursday, March 6, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. CT
This webinar provides essential information about scholarship, internship, award, and grant opportunities available to Sigma Tau Delta members during the upcoming Spring Awards Cycle. Applications for the Spring Awards Cycle will be open March 10 – April 7, 2025.
Presented by:
Amy Gates, Scholarships & Awards Committee Chair
Felicia Steele, Partnerships Committee Chair
Webinar with Paullett Golden, Author of A Dash of Romance
Wednesday, February 26, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. CT
Paullett Golden writes Historical Romances that give voice to the outliers and survivors, the wallflowers and overshadowed. With her portrayal of love and historical authenticity, she promises enchanting immersion in Georgian England, from mores to moorlands. After establishing her career as a University Professor and seasoned speaker—keynotes, conferences, workshops, commencements, and more—she learned from an oncologist she had only three months to live. And so, she did. She aimed to survive by writing her first novel, a novel she claims saved her life. While she wrote to live, she now lives to write.
Presented by:
Chris Lockwood, NEHS Director
Lindsey Ward, NEHS Advisory Council
An Evening with Grace Paley Prize Winner E. P. Tuazon
Wednesday, September 25, 2024, at 6:00 p.m. CT
E. P. Tuazon is a Filipino American writer from Los Angeles. They have work included in several publications such as The Rumpus, Lunch Ticket, Peatsmoke, and Five South. His work was chosen by ZZ Packer as the winner of the 2022 AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. They are currently a member of Advintage Press and The Blank Page Writing Club at The Open Book, Canyon Country. In their spare time, they like to go to Filipino seafood markets to gossip with the crabs.
Presented by:
Chris Lockwood, NEHS Director
Tara Ann Carter, NEHS Advisory Council
Submit to the 2025 Convention: Strategies and Tips
Tuesday, October 1, 2024, 6:00 p.m. CT
Are you interested in presenting your critical essay or creative work?
Do you want to engage with hundreds of other students and faculty at the Sigma Tau Delta Centennial Convention, March 19 - 22 in Pittsburgh, PA?
This webinar will guide you through types of submissions and on how to successfully prepare and submit a paper for convention. The convention submission period will be open September 30 through October 30, 11:00 p.m. CT.
All active Sigma Tau Delta student members, Sigma Kappa Delta student members, and alumni members have the opportunity to submit critical and creative papers. Students may also submit Research in the Round proposals, and everyone, including faculty may submit a roundable.
Presented by:
Leigh Dillard, Shannin Schroeder, and Kevin Stemmler, 2025 Convention Chairs
Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award Winner and Author of Sing, Unburied, Sing
Wednesday, October 16, 2024, 6:00 p.m. CT
Jesmyn Ward has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the historic winner—first woman and first Black American—of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award.
Presented by:
Chris Lockwood, NEHS Director
Webinar with Kickstart Prize for Underepresented Writers Winner Aneesa Marufu
Wednesday, November 13, 2024, at 6:00 p.m. CT
Aneesa Marufu lives in Manchester, UK, and was the winner of the Kimberley Chambers Kickstart Prize for underrepresented writers in 2019. The Balloon Thief and An Emerald Sky are part of a fantasy duology inspired by her South Asian heritage and her obsession with hot air balloons, though she is yet to fly in one! When she isn’t dreaming up stories set in the clouds, she has both feet on the ground, running after her two children or hunting for her next fantasy book to escape into.
Presented by:
Chris Lockwood, NEHS Director
Elizabeth McLaughlin, ELA Honor Society Advisory Council
