Wenyu Guo, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Literacy Studies 

Literacies that live across borders

I am a qualitative researcher, teacher educator, and former language teacher in China and the United States, and I came to this work as an immigrant, transnational, and multilingual person myself. My research is interdisciplinary, critical, and participatory: I study the translingual, transcultural, transnational, and racial experiences of im/migrant children, youth, and educators in literacy learning, instruction, and assessment, with the aim of unsettling the monolingual, monocultural, and monoracial assumptions that keep schools from reaching underserved young people.

What I try to hold onto is that families already carry what schools are looking for. Knowledge accumulated and sustained across borders is usually read in classrooms as a gap; I study it as a fund of knowledge, and as a counternarrative to straight-line stories of migration and assimilation.

Much of the work happens in one place over a long time. In 2019 I co-founded a community book club with a Chinese heritage language school in Columbia, South Carolina, its parent community, and a faculty colleague, and read with the same children week after week for three years. Sustained presence in a community is where I think this field learns most.

That commitment continues in Tampa, where I work with the local Chinese and Asian American community, collaborate with Rising Asian American Youth (RAAY) on youth empowerment, and take part in NAAAP’s professional and mentoring networks. Research–practice partnerships with community organizations are not an outreach add-on to my scholarship; they are where the questions come from.

Wenyu Guo
Wenyu Guo, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)
Assistant Professor, Literacy Studies
University of South Florida, Tampa
Where to find me
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Research focus

Multilingual literacy education and teacher preparation

This strand focuses on how emergent bilingual children in K–6 make meaning across languages through culturally sustaining pedagogies, including translanguaging, multicultural children’s literature, multimodal texts, and family literacy practices, and how elementary teachers enact critical translanguaging pedagogy and space so that children’s full repertoires count.

Children’s and adolescent literature

Critical content analysis of Asian and Asian American picturebooks and young adult literature, and work with pre-service teachers on critically examining those texts through a critical literacy lens and carrying that reading into their classrooms.

Asian American transnational racial and raciolinguistic literacies

This strand, the theoretical center of my program, focuses on how Asian American children, youth, and families learn race through language as racial discourses move across borders. It grew from my long-term participatory work with Asian American communities, including a year of participatory action research with nine im/migrant teachers in Tampa, who resisted anti-Asian racism while reproducing anti-Blackness absorbed from Chinese-language media. From that work we theorized transnational racial literacies, through which im/migrants interpret and contest race as racial ideas travel through media and kin networks.

Culturally relevant and sustaining AI literacies

This strand asks what changes when the listener evaluating a multilingual child’s language is a machine. Raciolinguistic scholarship locates linguistic “deficiency” in the listening subject rather than in the speaker; generative AI, built predominantly from standardized English text, is a new listening subject operating at scale, as it now reads children’s writing, generates classroom texts, and drafts feedback to families. This strand therefore carries the question that animates my first, whose language is heard as knowledge, into how K–12 teachers critically evaluate, redesign, and govern AI in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. I conceptualize AI literacy as a critical pedagogical practice in which teachers interrogate how generated materials represent, erase, and rank students and redesign them with community knowledge and culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy (CRSP).

Research interests

Racial and transnational literacies Bilingual and multilingual education Asian American studies Children’s and young adult literature Teacher education Critical and culturally responsive AI literacy

Awards and fellowships

Selected.

2026
J. Michael Parker Award

Literacy Research Association. For the empirical research paper, “Co-designing transnational racial literacies informed pedagogies and curricula: A participatory action research with Chinese im/migrant community parent-educators.” (Guo, Sun, Chu, & Yu).

2024–2026
Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Fellow

National Council of Teachers of English. A two-year national mentoring fellowship; six fellows are selected each year.

2025
Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring Award

University of South Florida, Tampa.

2023
Outstanding International Graduate Student Award

University of South Carolina. Also Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Award, 2023.

2020
Terry & Scott Peterson Fellowship

Awarded to one student a year for advancing K–12 opportunity by strengthening community and racial connections.

2020
Graduate Civic Scholars Program

An interdisciplinary fellowship selecting six graduate students a year; one of two awardees from the College of Education.

2020
Outstanding Achievement and Student Triumph Award

University of South Carolina, for service.

Professional certificates

2020–2023
Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research, University of South Carolina
2026
AI for the K-12 Classroom: Tools and Strategies for Educators, Teachers College, Columbia University
2026
Implementing AI in the Classroom Certificate Program, Penn GSE
2025
Teaching Toolkit Program, National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity
2024
Faculty Success Program, National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity
2020
K–12 Asian American Curriculum Teacher Training, The Asian American Education Project, UCLA Asian American Studies Center
2012
Middle School ESL Teacher Certificate, Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China
Scholarship
Publications, grants, talks, service

What each study asked and what it addresses, with links to the journals.
Current project
Children’s literature of transnationalism

A critical content analysis of 69 picturebooks, with the full annotated corpus.
Community
Bubble-Up Book Club

Three years of Sunday afternoons with Chinese American children in Columbia, South Carolina.

Scholarship

Peer-reviewed publications, funded and submitted grants, upcoming talks, and service to the profession and the university.

Publications Grants Talks Service

Publications

Selected refereed articles and chapters, most recent first.

Educational Researcher · 2026Theoretical contribution

Bringing language to AsianCrit: Introducing a Challenging Linguistic Racism tenet

Chu, Y., Tian, Z., & Guo, W. (2026). Educational Researcher.

An extension of Asian critical race theory through a raciolinguistic lens, arguing that racial hierarchy and linguistic dominance are inseparable in shaping how Asian and Asian American communities are racialized, and how they resist.

What it addresses: it names language ideology as both a mechanism of marginalization and a site of resistance, and defines a new AsianCrit tenet with implications for research, policy, and practice.

Read in the journal →
English Teaching: Practice & Critique · 2026Lead authorParticipatory research with in-service teachersFunded by ACTFL Research Priorities Grant · Co-PI

Cultivating critical racial consciousness in dual language bilingual education: A participatory design of Asian American biliteracy lessons

Guo, W., Tian, Z., & Stemme, M. (2026). English Teaching: Practice & Critique.

A one-year participatory study with two bilingual teachers in a middle school Chinese–English dual language program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, co-designing an antiracist Chinese Language Arts curriculum through AsianCrit and translanguaging.

What it addresses: it shows what racially and linguistically responsive pedagogy looks like in practice when students’ full communicative repertoires are treated as legitimate.

Read in the journal →
Language, Culture and Curriculum · 2026Project PITheoretical contributionParticipatory research with community-based migrant teachers

Racing across borders: Transnational racial literacies of Chinese heritage language school teachers

Chu, Y., Guo, W., Sun, Y., & Yu, M. (2026). Language, Culture and Curriculum, 1–17.

How teachers in a Chinese heritage language school make sense of race across two national contexts, and how that understanding shapes what they teach. A one-year participatory research project with nine community-based migrant teachers and parent-educators, co-designing critical racial literacy lessons for the community-based heritage language school. One teacher received national recognition: the lesson “From Angel Island to Paper Son” was accepted and presented at the 2025 National Chinese Language Conference.

What it addresses: it locates racial literacy in the heritage school, a community site usually left out of studies of racial learning.

Read in the journal →
Education Sciences · 2026 Lead author Large-scale critical systematic literature review · 2000–2024

Literacies of Transnational Students of Color: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis Through an Intersectionally Informed Critical Race Theory Lens

Guo, W., Smith, P., Stemme, M. R., Patterson, D., & Han, S. (2026). Literacies of Transnational Students of Color: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis Through an Intersectionally Informed Critical Race Theory Lens. Education Sciences, 16(10), 1598. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci16101598 

A critical interpretive systematic review of studies from 2000 to 2024, framed by intersectionality-informed critical race theory, synthesizing 121 empirical studies on the literacies of transnational students of Color across K–12 contexts. Their literacy practices emerge not as individual skills but as ideological, translocal, and translinguistic social practices shaped by racialization, colonial histories, linguistic hierarchies, xenophobia, and institutional norms. Students use literacy to negotiate identity, sustain transnational relationships, and resist deficit-based expectations. 

What it addresses: it proposes three reorientations for literacy research — from literacy to literacies, from individual to structural, and from local to transnational.

This piece traveled with us for almost two years, from the first team conversations in September 2024 through countless revisions and two hurricanes that interrupted the work. So glad it finally meets the world after two years of hard work.

Teachers College Record · 2025 Sole authored Community-engaged longitudinal study

Transnational funds of knowledge as counternarratives: Chinese students respond to multicultural children’s literature

Guo, W. (2025). Teachers College Record, 127(9–10), 37–66.

Drawing on a broadened conceptualization of transnational funds of knowledge and on critical race methods, this study follows Chinese American children reading multicultural children’s literature and shows how they mobilize family knowledge built across borders as counternarrative.

What it addresses: it treats transnational literacy as a dynamic ecosystem rather than a deficit, and reimagines children’s literature of transnationalism as a subgenre that resists linear accounts of migration.

Read in the journal →
Australian Journal of Language and Literacy · 2025 International Theoretical contribution

“This is like a mirror! That’s like me!” Differentiated literature mirrors for diverse children

Adam, H., Boutte, G., López-Robertson, J., Guo, W., Jackson-Barrett, L., & Kozeny, M. (2025). Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 48(283–299).

A cross-national collaboration examining how Aboriginal, African American, Latino/a, and Asian children’s literatures work as mirrors, in distinct but connected ways.

What it addresses: it treats the mirror metaphor as differentiated rather than universal, and asks what each community’s literature is actually doing.

Read in the journal →
Edward Elgar · 2025 Book chapter

“U.S. and China can be friends for once”: Immigrant children engage in transnational literature in a community-based book club

Guo, W., & Sun, Y. (2025). In P. Edwards, C. Compton-Lilly, & G. Li (Eds.), The International Handbook of Literacies in Families and Communities (pp. 186–205).

Children in the book club read transnational literature together and talk their way through geopolitics, family history, and their own place between two countries.

What it addresses: it documents a community space that schools rarely provide, and what becomes sayable there.

Read the chapter →
Journal of Children’s Literature · 2024Sole authoredCommunity-engaged book club

Fostering Student Activism: Addressing Anti-Asian Racism through Children’s Literature in a Community-Based Book Club

Guo, W. (2024). The Journal of Children’s Literature, 50(2), 25–37.

Chinese American children read about anti-Asian racism and move from recognition toward action in their own school and community.

What it addresses: it offers teachers a concrete route from a picturebook discussion to student activism.

Read the article →
Bilingual Research Journal · 2023Two-year family–school partnership

“That’s my mission”: Examining parents’ investments in their emergent bilingual learners’ development

Sanchez, L., Bauer, E., Wang, Y., Guo, W., Hao, L., & Hwang, K. (2023). Bilingual Research Journal, 46(3–4), 224–238.

A study of how parents of emergent bilingual children invest time, language, and effort in their children’s development, in their own words. Part of a two-year family–school partnership project in a dual language school, which held monthly bilingual and biliteracy development workshops to support emergent bilinguals.

What it addresses: it counters the assumption that immigrant parents are uninvolved, showing sustained investment that schools often do not recognize.

Read in the journal →
The Reading Teacher · 2022

A content analysis of Chinese American contemporary realistic fiction books

Wang, Y., Guo, W., & Sui, X. (2022). The Reading Teacher, 76(2), 159–168.

A critical content analysis of nearly forty contemporary picturebooks representing Chinese Americans and diasporic cultures.

What it addresses: it found many portrayals utopian and depoliticized, with school life — the center of children’s daily experience — largely absent.

Read in the journal →

Also published, accepted, and in press

  • Banack, A., Nam, R., & Guo, W. (Accepted). Reading girlhood: Representations of Asian American youth in contemporary graphic novels. Research on Diversity in Youth Literature.
  • Xu, N., Tian, Z., & Guo, W. (In press). Examining translanguaging discourses in Mandarin–English dual language immersion classrooms: A three-site inquiry. L2 Journal, Berkeley Language Center.
  • Guo, W. (2024). Interrogating anti-Asian racism: Children’s literature as a nexus for antiracist education. WOW Stories, 11(1), 4–13.
  • Wang, Y., Sánchez, L., Bauer, E., Guo, W., Hao, L., & Hwang, K. (2023). A new language, a new culture, and a new way of thinking. In V. Lee & K. Lewis (Eds.), Advancing Culturally Responsive and Socially Just Approaches to Multilingual Family–School Partnerships. Lexington Books.
  • Guo, W. (2024). Review: Language is a superpower, a zine by Chinese for Affirmative Action. Bilingual Research Journal, 47(4), 567–569. Link
  • Guo, W. (2023). Second reaction: The fearless flights of Hazel Ying Lee. First Opinions, Second Reactions, 16(1). Link
  • Kuther, T. L., & Morgan, R. D. (2014). Careers in Psychology (4th ed.) (X. Wang & W. Guo, Trans.). China Labor Society Security Publishing House.

Grants

Funded projects and submitted proposals.

Funded · 2026–2027 · $2,500

ELATE Research Initiative Grant

Guo, W. (PI), & Sun, Y. (Co-PI). A multicase study of secondary English teachers negotiating AI-generated curriculum through culturally sustaining literacies. English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE), National Council of Teachers of English.

Funded · 2026–2027 · $15,000

USF College of Education New Researcher Grant

Guo, W. (PI), & Pei, B. (Co-PI). Cultivating AI-literate educators for ethical, equitable, and culturally responsive AI integration in K–12 literacy instruction. University of South Florida.

Year-long participatory practitioner inquiry with 16 teachers from Hillsborough County Public Schools, in partnership with USF’s David C. Anchin Center for the Advancement of Teaching, which hosts the six-session series and awards a 20-hour professional learning credential to completers.

Funded · 2026 · $8,500

AmplifyGAIN Center, University of Washington

Pei, B. (PI), Guo, W. (Co-PI), & Park, S. (Co-PI). Building educators’ AI competency nationwide—AmplifyLearn.AI.

Funded · 2024 · $5,000

Fostering Multiracial Solidarity through Antiracist Translanguaging Pedagogy

Co-Principal Investigator, with Z. Tian (PI). ACTFL Research Priorities Grant.

A year-long participatory design of an antiracist Chinese Language Arts curriculum in a Chinese immersion program.

Funded · 2020 · $2,900

Between Two Worlds: Asian American Children (Re)negotiate Bicultural Identities through Culturally Relevant Children’s Literature

Principal Investigator. SPARC Graduate Research Grant.

Seed funding for the book club study that became the dissertation.

Revising for resubmission · 2025 · $12,000

Building Family–Community–Researcher Partnerships: Confronting Xenophobia Through Co-Designed Anti-Oppressive Curriculum and Pedagogies

Principal Investigator, with Y. Chu (Co-PI). USF New Research Grant.

RESUBMISSION PLANNED · SUMMER 2027 · $75,000

Fostering an Asian (American) Antiracist Curriculum through Participatory Methods

Principal Investigator, with T. Qiu (Co-PI). Spencer Foundation Racial Equity Grant. Highly rated in 2024; resubmission strongly encouraged by reviewers.

Upcoming talks and presentations

2026 season.

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Service

Editorial and review service, and service to professional organizations and institutions.

Editorial and review service

Editorial review board service, manuscript review for journals in literacy and language education, and conference proposal review.

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International, national, organizational, and institutional service

Elected and appointed roles in the professional organizations of literacy and education research, and service to the university, college, and program.

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Contact me

I am glad to hear from teachers, families, heritage schools, prospective students, and colleagues looking for collaborators. Email is the surest way to reach me.

Office
Department of Language, Literacy, Ed.D., Exceptional Education, and Physical Education
College of Education
University of South Florida, Tampa
USF faculty page →
Prospective doctoral students

Tell me what you want to study and why. I especially welcome students working on transnational and racial literacies, Asian American education, bilingual education, and children’s literature.

Teachers, schools, and families

If you are starting a book club, choosing texts, or planning professional development, write to me. I am glad to share materials and talk it through.

Speaking and collaboration

For invited talks, webinars, and research–practice partnerships, please include dates and audience in your first email.

Teaching

Teaching is a sociocultural and sociopolitical practice. In a system still stratified by whose identities and ideologies count as normal, teacher educators carry a responsibility to prepare teachers who are critically conscious and actively antiracist, and who can teach from the strengths of every learner.

My approach is assets-based before it is anything else. Students’ languages, family histories, and community literacies are the material we teach with, not obstacles to work around. Guided by critical race theory, multiliteracies, translanguaging, and intersectionality, I help pre-service and practicing teachers select texts, design curriculum, and teach through culturally sustaining, equity-driven practice.

In my undergraduate and graduate classrooms I try to build spaces that are safe, brave, and caring: sustained communal dialogue, students’ own narratives and lived literacies honored as knowledge, and critical literacy developed through the work of creators from historically minoritized communities.

What students do in my courses

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Courses taught

Undergraduate and graduate, at the University of South Florida and the University of South Carolina.

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What students say

From anonymous end-of-course evaluations and midterm surveys.

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Screenshot of anonymous instructor comments from a course evaluation report
Instructor comments as they appear in the course evaluation report, unedited.

What colleagues observed

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Mentoring

I grew as a critical qualitative researcher through collaborative inquiry and (fem)mentorship, and I mentor the way I was mentored: weekly time, real projects, and co-authorship rather than errands. Mentoring is relational work, and for international and first-generation students it also means helping them find their footing in an unfamiliar system.

I currently mentor four doctoral students — three in Literacy Studies and one in Educational Technology — and serve as major professor for one of them. With him I meet weekly, planned his program of study, connected him with a local Chinese heritage language school as a research site, and brought him into ongoing projects, which has produced scholarship proposals and conference presentations.

Three doctoral students have worked with me as research assistants on research agenda development, timelines, literature reviews, data analysis, and scholarly writing. Two have since finished their assistantships, and we still publish together. I have also supervised two undergraduate students on a study of children’s literature and racial justice, which they are preparing to present at a conference.

I especially welcome students with historically marginalized identities who want to become independent scholars — critical, creative, thoughtful, and intentional.

“Dr. Guo was available to support my work through regular feedback and advice, acting as both my cheerleader and constructive thinking partner. I gained a tremendous amount of knowledge working for her during a relatively short period of time. Though I no longer work as her research assistant, we are still collaborating to complete projects we began during our time together as co-authors.”

Margaret Robertson Stemme, former graduate research assistant, 2024–2025
Work we published together
  • Guo, W., Tian, Z., & Stemme, M. (2026). Cultivating critical racial consciousness in dual language bilingual education. English Teaching: Practice & Critique.
  • Guo, W., Smith, P., Stemme, M., Patterson, D., & Han, S. (conditionally accepted). Literacies of transnational youth of Color: A critical review of research. Education Sciences.
  • Guo, W., Smith, P., Stemme, M., Patterson, D., & Han, S. (2025). Literacies of transnational students of Color: A critical review of research. National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention, Denver, CO; and Literacy Research Association 75th Annual Conference, Las Vegas, NV.

“As a new doctoral student, I felt pretty excited to start a new journey but also experienced the pressure of learning in a totally unfamiliar environment. The independent study with Dr. Guo helps me clear up confusions and worries and engage myself with academic life as a PhD student.”

Pengju Guan, doctoral advisee, independent study reflection, Fall 2024

Teaching awards and professional learning

I share assignment descriptions, activities, and textbooks with colleagues, co-revised two course curricula, and have presented on my teaching methods in professional development workshops at the National Council of Teachers of English for the past three years.

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Certificate →

For teachers and families

Materials you can use directly: booklists, lesson ideas, and writing addressed to educators and parents rather than to researchers.

Booklist
69 picturebooks on transnationalism →

Filterable by transnational practice, heritage community, and age, with a printable table view.

Written for teachers
Children’s literature and antiracist teaching
Fostering Student Activism: Addressing Anti-Asian Racism through Children’s Literature in a Community-Based Book Club (2024) Interrogating anti-Asian racism: Children’s literature as a nexus for antiracist education (2024)
Downloads
Lesson plans and curricula

Materials from the Asian American biliteracy lessons we co-designed with bilingual teachers. Coolies by Yin and Chris Soentpiet anchors the unit.

We translated the picturebook ourselves and pitched the language to the Chinese proficiency of fifth graders in a Chinese immersion classroom.

New lesson
爷爷奶奶的故事
Grandparent Stories Across Places
60 minutes · 3–4 students · grades 1–3 · Tampa Bay Chinese School

A read-aloud, drawing, and writing sequence on intergenerational love. Children read a picturebook about a grandparent, then map their own family, languages, food, places, and holidays, and build a bridge between two sides of their lives. Mandarin, English, dialects, and mixed language all count as answers.

The teacher guide walks through discussion prompts, what to listen for as children talk and draw, and a short reflection after class to plan the next session. Ask families before sharing any child’s work beyond the classroom.

0–5Welcome and family-word warm-up 5–20Read-aloud with notice / connect / wonder 20–32Book Detective: independent browsing 32–47Identity map and grandparent memory 47–57Bridge talk and sharing 57–60Exit ticket
Downloads
Books for this lesson
Picturebooks on intergenerational love

One anchor read-aloud, plus one or two browsing books per child. These titles keep grandparent affection, distance, memory, food, and shared language at the center.

A Morning with Grandpa · Sylvia Liu, 2016
Anchor read-aloud. Tai chi and yoga traded back and forth; affection shown through teaching each other.
My Day With Gong Gong · Sennah Yee, 2020
A day in Chinatown with a Cantonese-speaking grandfather and very little shared vocabulary.
Drawn Together · Minh Lê, 2018
Grandfather and grandson find a shared language in drawing when speech fails them.
Quiet Time with My Seeya · Dinalie Dabarera, 2023
Closeness built from routine and gesture rather than words. Good for the youngest readers.
I Dream of Popo · Livia Blackburne, 2021
Love maintained across an ocean through video calls, and what migration costs it.
Grandpa Across the Ocean · Hyewon Yum, 2021
A summer in Korea with a grandfather the child barely knows; unfamiliarity turning into affection.
Grandmother’s Visit · Betty Quan, 2018
Everyday practices becoming a way to remember. Read it with a teacher prepared for grief.

Fifty-one of the sixty-nine titles on the booklist carry intergenerational relations as a transnational practice. Filter the full list →

Where else to look for books

Organizations and booklists I return to when selecting texts.

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Media and public engagement

Press, interviews, recorded talks, and community events.

USF College of Education News · September 13, 2024

Dr. Wenyu Guo Selected as an Awardee by the NCTE Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Program

On the two-year national fellowship, the ECEOC Summer Institute in Washington, D.C., and the community-engaged participatory project on how Asian American children and their parents learn and unlearn about race together.

Read the story →
Wenyu Guo in a roundtable discussion with her NCTE leadership scholar cohort
With the ECEOC leadership scholar cohort at the Summer Institute, Washington, D.C.
Kickoff session · USF College of Education · 2026–27

Cultivating AI-Literate Educators: the teacher cohort begins

We opened the AI Literacy K–12 Teacher Cohort, a series of six workshops for Tampa Bay teachers on ethical, equitable, and culturally responsive AI integration in literacy instruction. The project is funded by a USF College of Education New Researcher Grant and run in partnership with the David C. Anchin Center.

Teachers who attend five of the six sessions earn a Certificate of Advanced Professional Learning in AI in Education from the Anchin Center and a digital AI Literacy badge.

Wenyu Guo (PI) · Bo Pei (Co-PI) · Sanghoon Park · Rachel Hatten · Stephanie Arthur · Guliz Otkiran Clare
The facilitator presenting what cohort participants earn at the AI literacy kickoff
Walking teachers through the certificate and digital badge. Participants’ faces are covered for privacy.
K–12 teachers seated around tables at the cohort kickoff
Teacher Educator Fellow · June 16–18, 2026 · UC Riverside

Institute for Teachers of Color Committed to Racial Justice (ITOC), 2026–27

ITOC is a national professional development fellowship for teachers of Color and teacher educators of Color, hosted by UC Riverside’s School of Education and sponsored by The California Endowment. It brings together Teacher Education, Educational Leadership, and Ethnic Studies to support wellbeing, strengthen racial literacy, and build racial justice leadership.

I joined the three-day Summer Institute in Riverside for keynotes, workshops, racial justice action plan working groups, wellness and creative arts sessions, and the femtorship program. The fellowship continues through the 2026–27 school year online, with community gatherings, public talks with UCR’s K–12 Ethnic Studies Speaker Series, a well-being collective, and a book club.

About ITOC →
ITOC 2026 fellows gathered in front of the UCR sign with raised fists
ITOC fellows at the 2026 Summer Institute, University of California, Riverside.
Invited speaker · September 14, 2026 · Brandon, FL

Rising Asian American Youth (RAAY), Session Two

RAAY is a youth program of NAAAP Tampa Bay, the local chapter of the National Association of Asian American Professionals. It offers middle and high school students a welcoming space to explore Asian cultures, talk about mental health and bullying, and grow as leaders alongside mentors and professionals from the Tampa Bay community.

I was invited to join the second session as a mentor for local Asian American middle and high school students, which featured personal and career mentorship, a conversation on mental health awareness, racialization, personal wellbeing, and an evening learning about Vietnam, with food to share.

A RAAY organizer introducing NAAAP and RAAY to students at Brandon Event Space
Opening the session: what NAAAP and RAAY are. Students’ faces are covered for privacy.
NAAAP Tampa leaders presenting to RAAY students A middle school student speaker presenting at RAAY A student-made display board about Vietnam
Wenyu Guo Grace Lin
Wenyu Guo (left) in conversation with Grace Lin (right). Grace Lin photograph courtesy of Little Brown.
Author interview

Reclaiming Joy, Disrupting Tropes, and Advancing Critical Pedagogy with Grace Lin

A conversation with Newbery Honor author and illustrator Grace Lin about joy, the tropes children’s literature keeps repeating, and what critical pedagogy asks of authors and teachers alike.

I conducted the interview as Co-Chair of the Author Breakfast for the Children’s Literature Assembly, National Council of Teachers of English. Sponsored by Little, Brown, Grace Lin’s publisher.

Read the interview →

Webinars

Poster for the Reimagining Literacy Education webinar, David C. Anchin Center
May 1, 2024 · David C. Anchin Center for the Advancement of Teaching, in partnership with the USF Literacy Studies program

Reimagining Literacy Education: Empowering Minoritized Voices and Diverse Perspectives

As the world grapples with the aftermath of the pandemic, researchers and educators face the task of reassessing and reshaping literacy education. The webinar centered four minoritized literacies in order to bring them into the research landscape, and discussed strategies for preparing teachers for a diverse student population.

Panel: Wenyu Guo, Susan Bennett, Julia López-Robertson, Helen Adam, Eliza Braden, and Sohyun An. Free and open to the public.
Poster for the 2023 CLA Student Committee webinar
July 12, 2023 · Children’s Literature Assembly Student Committee, National Council of Teachers of English

Disrupting Monolingually Oriented Praxis: Children’s Literature as a Nexus for Translanguaging and Social Justice Pedagogies

The Children’s Literature Assembly Student Committee’s annual webinar, with over thirty attendees from the United States, Canada, and beyond.

Panel: Angie Zapata, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, Wenyu Guo, and Grace Enriquez. The recording is available to CLA members through the CLA website.

Invited session posters

AERA 2024, Philadelphia.

Poster for the AERA 2024 invited session Amplifying Diasporan Literacies
Amplifying Diasporan Literacies in Educational Research and Teaching — International Relations Committee invited session, AERA 2024. Chair: Gloria S. Boutte. Discussant: Joyce E. King.
Poster for the AERA 2024 symposium Disrupting the Single Story
Disrupting the Single Story: Transformative Children’s Literature for Social Justice — AERA 2024 symposium, co-chaired with Laxmi Prasad Ojha. Discussant: Catherine Compton-Lilly.
Booklist

Children’s literature of transnationalism

Sixty-nine Asian(American) picturebooks published between 2015 and 2025, annotated and compiled by Dr. Wenyu Guo, Dr. Rong Zhang, and Dr. Yuechen Sun, and shared here for teachers, librarians, and researchers.

Children’s literature of transnationalism should reflect the richly complex mobility — and fluid transnational practices — of (im)migrants between and across national, linguistic, cultural, and sociopolitical borders.

It should portray the enduring ties children and families maintain with their native countries, cultures, and heritages, and represent cultural traditions as dynamic, evolving, and fluid, rather than static, antiquated, or exoticized artifacts.

Guo, W. (2025). Teachers College Record, 127(9–10), 37–66. Read the article →

For a content analysis of Chinese American picturebooks, see Wang, Y., Guo, W., & Sui, X. (2022). A content analysis of Chinese American contemporary realistic fiction books. The Reading Teacher, 76(2), 159–168. Read the article →

The list below is ordered by publication year, most recent first, and alphabetically within year. Award and honor information appears only where a named award is recorded. Transnational practice categories are nonexclusive, so a book may appear under several categories.

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Community-engaged project · 2019–2022

Bubble-Up Book Club

A non-profit, culturally sustaining book club I co-founded in 2019 with a Chinese heritage language school in Columbia, South Carolina, its parent community, and Dr. Yuechen Sun. For three years it ran weekly, one hour on Sunday afternoons, reading Asian American children’s literature with local im/migrant children and youth.

The club gave children an other space, no language and culture erasure, no banned books, in which to say things about race, language, heritage, family, and community that are normally silenced in the classroom. It also became the site of my longitudinal practitioner-inquiry dissertation on Chinese American students’ engagement with multicultural literature through AsianCrit and multimodal literacies.

Books are mirrors and windows: they reflect who children are, and show them someone different.

2019
co-founded with the heritage school and parent community
3 years
of weekly Sunday sessions, 2019–2022
36+
picturebooks and graphic novels read together
1 hr
every Sunday, 3:30–4:30 pm
Writing from the club

The book club is the site for several published studies.

What we read

Asian American children’s literature, age-appropriate graphic novels, and picturebooks on immigration history and lived experience.

See the transnationalism corpus →
Starting one

If you are a teacher, parent, or heritage school considering a book club, I am glad to share materials and talk it through.

Children and facilitators reading together at the first book club meeting
2019.01 — the first book club meeting.
Children, parents, and facilitators of the Chinese Reading Club at the last class of the year
2019.12 — the last class of the year.
A read-aloud in the book club, children seated in a circle around the facilitator
A read-aloud, with the semester’s themes on the screen behind.
Children reading picturebooks on their own during a book club session
Independent reading time.
Book club session with picturebooks and writing materials laid out on the tables
Books and writing materials set out before a session.
A stack of Asian American picturebooks used in the book club
Some of the picturebooks we read together.