2025 ALSC Charlemae Rollins President's Program
Join ALSC for "The Current Landscape of AI and its Effects on Children", a timely and crucial conversation about artificial intelligence and its growing influence on children’s lives, featuring distinguished voices at the intersection of technology, education, and social impact. This year’s 2025 ALSC President’s Program speakers will explore the ethical use of AI tools for children and libraries, and will discuss how AI impacts society and the role of technology companies in shaping responsible AI tools that are free from bias.
Monday, June 30, 2025 | 1:00-2:30pm | Location TBD
Martha Brockenbrough
Martha Brockenbrough is the author of more than twenty books for young readers, including YA fiction and nonfiction, picture books, a middle grade mystery, and a chapter book series. She founded National Grammar Day, wrote game questions for Carnium and Trivial Pursuit, and was the co-chair of faculty at VCFA's MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program. The former editor of MSN.com, Martha has interviewed lots of celebrities, including the Jonas Brothers, Jason Bateman, Mike Myers, and Slash. Her work has been published in The New York Times. She also wrote an educational humor column for Encarta for nine years.
Her book Future Tense: How We Made Artificial Intelligence - and How It Will Change Everything, is a non-fiction book for teens, that guides readers through the development of this world-changing technology, exploring how AI has touched every corner of our world, and helps teens understand how artificial intelligence got here, how to make the best use of it, and how we can expect it to transform our lives.
Dr. Desmond Upton Patton
Dr. Desmond Upton Patton is the Brian and Randi Schwartz University Professor and the thirty-first Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor. He has joint appointments in the School of Social Policy & Practice and the Annenberg School for Communication along with a secondary appointment in the department of psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Patton's work includes research on the relationship between social media and gang violence, as well as language analysis and bias in AI. He is a member of Twitter's Academic Research advisory board and Spotify's Safety Advisory Council. He is the the creator of the Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM), which centers and privileges culture, context and inclusion in machine learning and computer vision analysis. His research at the intersections of social media, AI, empathy and race has been mentioned in the New York Times, Nature, Washington Post, NPR, Vice News, ABC News and more.
Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, PhD, is Chair of the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan’s Marsal Family School of Education, as well as Associate Professor of Education. She is the author of The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (NYU Press, 2019). Her most recent books are Harry Potter and the Other: Race, Justice, and Difference in the Wizarding World (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) co-edited with Sarah Park Dahlen, and Restorying Young Adult Literature: Expanding Students’ Perspectives with Digital Texts (NCTE, 2023) co-authored by James Joshua Coleman and Autumn A. Griffin.
In addition to her work on books for young readers, she has published widely on race, discourse, and interaction in classrooms and digital environments. In conjunction with the National Writing Project, Amy Stornaiuolo (Penn GSE), Elyse Eidman-Aadahl (NWP), and Sarah Levine (Stanford), she is a co-principal investigator on a major James S. McDonnell Foundation Teachers as Learners grant, the Digital Discourse Project (DDP), a longitudinal collaborative inquiry into how partnering teacher consultants studied their own discourse practices with data and platforms as they facilitated online discussions during and after the COVID-19 era. Learn more at ebonyelizabeththomas.com.
Moderator: Manuela Aronofsky
Manuela Aronofsky is the Middle School Technology Integrator and digital essentials teacher at the Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her MLIS from Pratt Institute in December 2019. Manuela has served as a member or chair on various ALSC committees (including Children and Technology, Organizational Effectiveness, and 2025 Pura Belpré Selection), and has worked for several years to organize the annual New York State Association of Independent Schools conference for librarians and technologists. Beyond a passion for integrating technology ethically and intentionally into the middle school learning environment, Manuela organizes with the Prison Library Support Network - a volunteer-run organization that works to connect incarcerated people with information services. Contact info and more can be found at manuelaaronofsky.com.
Thank you to Macmillan Children's Publishing Group for their support of the 2025 Charlemae Hill Rollins President's Program.
The 2025 ALSC Charlemae Hill Rollins President's Program is organized by Celeste Swanson and Maria Vega on behalf of ALSC 2024-2025 Board President Dr. Rob Bittner.
The annual program is supported by the Charlemae Hill Rollins Endowment Fund. Learn more about Charlemae Hill Rollins and her commitment to children's librarianship.
