Meet Our Featured Speakers for Multilingual Illinois 2022!

The Illinois Resource Center is thrilled to have an exciting roster of featured speakers for this year’s conference, from local leaders on family engagement to digital storytellers to a New York Times bestselling author. Learn more about our featured speakers and register for #MultilingualIL22 today!

Lorena Mancilla, Hope Chicago

Dr. Lorena Mancilla, the daughter of immigrants and first-generation college graduate, attributes her passion for the field of family engagement to her family and raíces, lived history, and professional experience as a teacher, researcher, and leader.

She brings almost 20 years of experience in the field of language education to her work and research, which is rooted in respeto for families and all they do and offer to their children’s educational journey. She currently serves as the Parent Program Director at Hope Chicago, an organization that provides a unique, two-generation scholarship model for Chicago students and families from low-income communities. Dr. Mancilla leads the development and implementation of Hope Chicago’s Parent Scholarship Program, a program that will help parents fulfill their dreams of completing a postsecondary degree or credential.

Prior to joining Hope Chicago in 2022, Lorena spent 11 years at WIDA, where she served in a variety of roles and contributed to the design and development of multiple WIDA resources. As the Director of WIDA Early Years, she helped to establish partnerships with multiple state agencies and led the development of professional learning resources for early care and education professionals serving young multilingual children and families. Lorena earned her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the intersection of family engagement and language education. She has authored multiple publications on the topic of family engagement and language-focused family engagement.

Marco Antonio Torres

Marco Antonio Torres is a Learning and Leadership Executive at Apple supporting schools in Los Angeles. Previously, he was the Director of Story for Digital Promise Global, an influential organization at the intersection of leadership, innovation, research, and technology development to improve learning opportunities. Marco also taught middle school and high school in his community, in Los Angeles, where he worked to leverage the power of multimedia, and creativity to help students have a voice and a platform to share their challenges and solutions with the world. He also was an education technology director, and one of the professional learning leaders for one of the nation’s largest urban schools in Los Angeles. As the Senior Specialist/Learning Engineer at Apple, where he has worked for 20 years, he was in charge of designing and implementing a professional learning plan for teachers, leaders and students of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

As an Apple Distinguished Educator (1999), artist, Marco continues to participate in a global network that he connects with regularly to address issues of equity and opportunity. He has been fortunate to work all over the world in a variety of situations that help his perspective of what learning looks like. He helped schools use story strategies and learning frameworks to plan, produce, present, and promote effectiveness. Marco believes if we don’t tell our stories and/or teach others to do so, others will continue to tell it for us.

Ryan Nelson

Ryan Nelson, PhD, CCC-SLP is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Communicative Disorders at the University of Louisiana, at Lafayette. He holds the Doris B. Hawthorne-BORSF Endowed Professorship in Communicative Disorders.

Dr. Nelson’s research considers literacy growth of children with language disorders from lenses of strengths. He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of Adolescence and Adult Literacy and Literacy Research: Theory Method, and Practice (LR:TMP) Vol. 70. He was the associate editor of the Journal of Interactional Research in Communication Disorders from 2010-2021.

In addition to many peer-reviewed publications, he is the co-author of Counseling in Communication Disorders: A wellness perspective and co-editor of The Handbook of Qualitative Research in Communicative Disorders. His current research uses eye-tracking technology to illuminate the reading strengths of children from diverse backgrounds.

Erika L. Sánchez

Erika L. Sánchez is a Mexican American poet, novelist, and essayist.

She is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, was published by Graywolf in July 2017, and was a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. Her debut young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, published in October 2017 by Knopf Books for Young Readers, was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Awards finalist. It is now being made into a film directed by America Ferrera. Most recently Sánchez published a critically acclaimed memoir-in-essays titled Crying in the Bathroom with Viking Books.

Sánchez was a Fulbright Scholar, a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent fellow from the Poetry Foundation, a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2018 recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and a 2019 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz chair at DePaul University in Chicago.