Dr. Roberta Seelinger Trites is Distinguished Professor of English Emerita at Illinois State University, where she taught children’s and adolescent literature from 1991-2022, while also filling several administrative roles. She is a past president of the Children’s Literature Association and edited the ChLA Quarterly (2000-2004). The ChLA awarded her with its lifetime achievement award, the Anne Devereaux Jordan Award, in 2023. Trites is the author of Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels (1997), Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature (2000), Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel (2007), Literary Conceptualizations of Growth: Metaphors and Cognition in Adolescent Literature (2014), and Twenty-First Century Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature (2018). With Betsy Hearne, she has also co-edited A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives (2009). She and her co-author Sean P. Connors have a book forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi in 2025: Neoliberalism in Young Adult Fiction: Exceptionalism, Exploitation, and Erasure.