Munro Richardson is Executive Director of Read Charlotte, a community initiative that unites families, educators, and community partners with the goal of improving third grade reading proficiency in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. In this role he is responsible for using research, data, and strategic funding to coordinate, integrate and align the efforts of dozens of organizations across Charlotte-Mecklenburg to improve children’s language and literacy development from birth through third grade.

Munro has worked in philanthropy for over 20 years. Munro joined Read Charlotte as the founding Executive Director in 2015. Read Charlotte is his fifth startup venture. He has received local and national recognition for his efforts at Read Charlotte.

Munro holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors, master’s degrees from both Harvard University (where he was a Mellon Fellow) and Oxford University (where he was a Rhodes Scholar), and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He is co-author with Samantha Cleaver of Read With Me: Engaging Your Young Child in Active Reading, published by Rowman & Littlefield in November 2018.

Munro is married to his high school sweetheart, Teresa, and has three daughters.

Jamar Rahming is a native of Denver CO. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Black Studies and a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Rahming has worked in the library industry for twenty years in 8 different states including a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution. He presently leads the Wilmington Institute Free Library, recipient of 2022 IMLS Medal, 2022 Dana Cotton Award, and Fodors Travel “Most Beautiful Library in the U.S.” award.

Since 2002, Pat Losinski has served as Chief Executive Officer of the Columbus Metropolitan Library. CML has 23 locations and an operations center with 880 employees and an annual operating budget of $80M.

Prior to joining CML, Pat was executive director of Pikes Peak Library District in Colorado Springs. He has worked for public library systems in Wisconsin, Illinois, Colorado and Ohio and served on the state library boards in Illinois and Colorado. He is the past chair of the Urban Libraries Council’s Governing Board and a former Governing Board member of the International Federation of Library Associations headquartered in The Hague. Most recently, Pat is helping lead a $250M capital improvement plan for 16 new or remodeled library buildings.

CML received the Institute for Museum and Library Services National Medal in 2011 and was named Library Journal’s National Library of the Year in 2010.

Columbus CEO magazine named him 2015 CEO of the Year in the large non-profit category. He was also awarded the 2017 Regional Leadership Award by the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission and in 2018 received Columbus Business First’s C-Suite Awards for Most Admired Executive and Lifetime Achievement. Last year he was named University of Wisconsin’s iSchool’s 2021 Distinguished Alumnus and was inducted into the 2021 Junior Achievement of Central Ohio Business Hall of Fame.

Michelle H. Martin is the Beverly Cleary Endowed Professor for Children and Youth Services in the Information School at the University of Washington, and from 2011-2016, she was the inaugural Augusta Baker Endowed Chair in Childhood Literacy at the University of South Carolina.

She published Brown Gold: Milestones of African-American Children’s Picture Books, 1845-2002 (Routledge, 2004) and co-edited (with Claudia Nelson) Sexual Pedagogies: Sex Education in Britain, Australia, and America, 1879-2000 (Palgrave, 2003). She is currently co-editing with Tammy Mielke and Sarah Hardstaff Song of the Land, Critical Perspectives on the Works of Mildred D. Taylor, a collection of 14 essays and 3 poems, forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi (tentatively in 2023). Martin has been a part of the research teams for Project LOCAL and is currently working with Project VOICE and Autism-Ready Libraries—all IMLS-funded projects. She is the co-founder of Read-a-Rama (www.Read-a-Rama.org), a non-profit that uses children’s books as the springboard for year-round and summer camp programming, and she and Liz Mills are currently collecting data for “Camp Read-a-Rama Goes Virtual,” a project funded by the UW iSchool’s Strategic Research Fund, to learn how Read-a-Rama’s virtual programming from March 2020 through December 2021 impacted family literacy engagement.

Kathleen Campana, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Kent State University’s School of Information. Her research focuses on understanding the learning that occurs for children and families in informal and digital learning environments and how those environments support and impact the learning process. Her research has explored many different facets of early childhood development and learning in informal learning environments, including early literacy and math, computational thinking, play, family engagement, and aspects of social justice. She is the Principal Investigator for Project VOICE & Project SHIELD, both funded by IMLS, as well as Read Baby Read, funded by the William Penn Foundation. She has published two books: Supercharged Storytimes: An Early Literacy Planning and Assessment Guide and Create, Innovate, and Serve: A Radical Approach to Children’s and Youth Programming. Her work has also been published in a variety of library- and education-focused journals, such as Library Quarterly, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, Information and Learning Sciences, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, and Early Childhood Education Journal, among others.

J. Elizabeth Mills, PhD is an independent researcher. Her research explores the nature and role of reflection in the ways public librarians plan, deliver, and assess storytimes for young children. Mills has co-conducted several research studies, including librarians’ use of new media with young children, the role of social justice, value-centric outcomes in public libraries’ outreach efforts with families and young children, and the ways in which library and museum professionals incorporate computational thinking into their work with young children and their families. Mills is co-author of Supercharged Storytimes: An Early Literacy Planning and Assessment Guide and co-editor of Create, Innovate, and Serve: A Radical Approach to Children’s and Youth Programming. Mills is the author of more than 30 books for children, including The Spooky Wheels on the Bus. Visit jemillsresearch.weebly.com