Climate Lit Team
Members of the Climate Lit team come from a variety of backgrounds, contributing different skills and expertise to the project. Each contribution matters and all are essential for the success of Climate Lit. We are united by our mission to help build universal climate literacy through children’s literature and media.
Climate Lit is run by a dedicated team of volunteer Earthlings. See the Get Involved tab if you want to join us in any capacity. At this time, our core team includes the following folks:
Marek Oziewicz
Senior Editor
Marek Oziewicz is a Polish-born scholar of literature and story systems as sociocognitive technologies for personal empowerment and social transformation. Marek is Professor of Literacy Education and holds the Sidney and Marguerite Henry Professorship of Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the University of Minnesota. His research explores the deep grammar and design principles of story systems, especially in literature and media for young audiences. Marek serves as Director of the Center for Climate Literacy because he considers education as ground zero for building universal climate literacy and ushering in a just, sustainable world in which human and nonhuman lives can reach their full potential.
Emily Midkiff
Managing Editor
Emily Midkiff is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Dakota, where she teaches courses on children’s literature and literacy. Before getting her PhD, she spent 9 years working in children’s theater, and now does research on science fiction and fantasy for children with attention to what children have to say for themselves. She is the author of Equipping Space Cadets: Primary Science Fiction for Young Children, an interdisciplinary case study of science fiction for children.
Editors
Terri Doughty
Editor
Terri Doughty teaches Children’s literature at Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, Canada. She has published on girl culture, YA fantasy literature, and picturebooks, and currently works with Critical Plant Studies in children’s literature. Photo credit: Vancouver Island University.
David M. Higgins
Editor
David M. Higgins is associate professor of English and chair of the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide, and he is a senior editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. David is the author of Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-Victimhood. He has also published a critical monograph examining Ann Leckie’s SF masterwork Ancillary Justice, and his research has been published in journals such as American Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Paradoxa, and Extrapolation. In the public sphere, David has been a featured speaker on NPR’s radio show On Point, and his literary journalism has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Guardian.
Rachelle Saint Louis
Editor
Rachelle Saint Louis is a Haitian-American writer, born and raised in South Florida. She earned her bachelor’s as a double major in Psychology and English with a Concentration in Multicultural and Gender Studies and her master's in English Literature with a Specialization in Caribbean Literature from Florida Atlantic University. You can find her nerding out over her latest reads @raethereviewer on Instagram and Tik Tok.
Assistant Editors
Brianna Anderson
Assistant Editor
Brianna Anderson is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech, where she teaches multimodal writing courses. Her research examines how comics and graphic novels can teach children about environmental issues and inspire youth activism.
Sarah Annes Brown
Assistant Editor
Professor Sarah Annes Brown teaches English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University. Her research interests include classical reception, in particular the influence of Ovid on later literature, science fiction, and Shakespeare. Her most recent book, Shakespeare and Science Fiction, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2021.
Karen Hindhede
Assistant Editor
Karen Hindhede is currently the Interim Dean of Arts and Sciences at Central Arizona College (CAC). She continues to teach Children’s Literature for Educators at CAC where she has been an English faculty member for fifteen years. She earned a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in English. In 2024, she completed her doctorate in Sustainability Education from Prescott College, Arizona with her dissertation: Growing an Ecojustice Pedagogy and Ethic in Children’s Literature: Implications of Transdisciplinary Praxis.
Sara Austin
Assistant Editor
Sara Austin is an Assistant Professor at Kentucky Wesleyan College. Her interest in race, gender, and childhood identity has yielded articles in International Research in Children’s Literature, Transformative Works and Cultures, The Lion and the Unicorn, The Looking Glass: New Perspectives in Children’s Literature, and The Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics. Her first monograph, Monstrous Youth, explores monstrosity as a cultural metaphor for child identity.
Alena Cicholewski
Assistant Editor
Alena Cicholewski is an academic writing instructor at the University of Bremen (Germany). She also teaches at the Institute for English and American Studies at the University of Oldenburg (Germany), where she completed her PhD in English literature in 2020.
Caitlin Brecklin
Assistant Editor
Caitlin Brecklin is a postdoctoral researcher with the University of North Dakota's Initiative for Rural Education, Equity, and Economic Development (I-REEED) and the Bureau of Evaluation and Research Services (BEARS). She studies the social foundations and community politics of education.
Victoria de Rijke
Assistant Editor
Dr. Victoria de Rijke is Professor in Arts & Education at Middlesex University in London and co-chief Editor of Children’s Literature in Education Journal. Her research and publication is transdisciplinary, across the fields of literature and the arts, children’s literature, play and animal studies, through the associations of metaphor. Publications include The Untimely Art of Scribble (2023) Reading Children’s Literature in Education 3-13 (2020) and the edited collection Art & Soul: Rudolf Steiner, Interdisciplinary Art and Education (2019).
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