2024 Conference Speakers

Emily Drabinski is Associate Professor at the Queens College, CUNY School of Library and Information Studies and President of the American Library Association. She is series editor of Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies, a book series from Library Juice Press/Litwin Books and serves on the editorial board of the Philippine Journal of Library and Information Studies.

Researching articles, films, and her 31 books for adults and children, nationally bestselling author Sy Montgomery has been chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Rwanda, hunted by a tiger in India, and swum with piranhas, electric eels and pink dolphins in the Amazon. Her work has taken her from the cloud forest of Papua New Guinea (for a book on tree kangaroos) to the Altai Mountains of the Gobi (for another on snow leopards.) For THE SOUL OF AN OCTOPUS (a National Book Award finalist) she befriended octopuses at the New England aquarium and scuba dived and snorkeled with wild octopuses in Mexico and French Polynesia; next she drew on her scuba skills to cage dive with great white sharks. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, the writer Howard Mansfield, and their border collie Thurber.