Wendy Glenn

Professor of English Education

Curriculum and Instruction

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Academic Degrees

PhD, Curriculum and Instruction in English Education, Arizona State University

MEd, Secondary Education, Arizona State University

BA, English, Honors, Arizona State University

Areas of Expertise

English Teacher Education

Young Adult Literature

Critical Literary Theories

Classroom Pedagogies

Sports Literacy

Classroom and Library Censorship

About

Wendy Glenn is Professor of English Education. She was a faculty member at the University of Connecticut from 2008-2017 and the University of Colorado Boulder from 2017-2025. She returned to the University of Connecticut in Fall 2025, excited to resume and build new relationships with students and faculty. Her scholarship focuses on literature for youth and how story can be used to both foster connection and invite new ways of seeing, doing, and being. Her analytical work employs critical theories (e.g., identity, youth, positioning, place and space, embodiment, restorying) in examination of young adult texts to highlight the affordances and limitations of literature published for young people and how it is and might be critically incorporated into curricula and classrooms. Her empirical work invites preservice teachers, professional educators, and middle and high school students to explore how story can support readers in recognizing, better understanding, and responding to power and privilege in their and others’ lives in and out of the classroom.

Dr. Glenn is currently interested in exploring representations of girls and young women in sports literature for young people, including considerations of how access to sport can mediate tensions between identities and cultural expectations among fictional athletes in differing global settings and how authors and illustrators of fiction and non-fiction for youth forward specific assumptions around how young women athletes across intersectional identities should and can belong to sport. She is also analyzing data from a qualitative classroom study that explores the experiences of preservice teachers who hold non-sporting identities as they participate in a sports literacy unit as part of their teacher preparation.

Dr. Glenn served as President of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English (ALAN) and Senior Editor of the organization’s peer-reviewed journal, The ALAN Review. She was named a President’s Teaching Scholar, Faculty Athletics Fellow, Ted Hipple Award recipient, Nilsen-Donelson Award recipient, and Best Should Teach Gold Award recipient at the University of Colorado Boulder and a University Teaching Fellow, Fulbright Scholar to Norway, James Houck Lecturer, and Richard A. Meade Award recipient at the University of Connecticut. Before beginning her university career, she worked with incredible young people as a middle and high school English teacher in the Phoenix, Arizona metro area.

Forthcoming and Recent Publications

Glenn, W. J. (In press). Complicating the country: Rural identities and environmental values in youth fiction situated in rural spaces. International Research in Children’s Literature.

Caasi, E., & Glenn, W. J. (In press). (Re)inscribing ideologies: Examining ideological positioning of Black women athletes in nonfiction for children and young adults. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.

Glenn, W, J., & Ginsberg, R. (In press). Diverse YA literature in secondary classrooms: A content analysis of 20 years of empirical research. In Handbook of research on diversity in children’s and young adult literature, edited by Pat Enciso, Sarah Park Dahlen, and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas. New York, NY: Routledge.

Glenn, W. J. (In press). Connection, healing, and patriarchal disruption in a community of women responding to sexual violence. In V. Malo, & C. Hill (Eds.), Oxford handbook of young adult literature. London, UK: Oxford University Press.

Glenn, W. J., & Glaws, A. (In press). “When you are young, they assume you know nothing.”:  Constructions of youth in the Folklore love triangle. In A. J. Halsall (Ed.), Taylor Swift and transmedial storytelling. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.

Glenn, W. J. (2024). Loving the sport, loving the self: Devotion and defiance in Furia. [Special issue: Constructions of childhood(s) in fiction and nonfiction for children]. Literature, 4, 296-305.

Glenn, W. J. (2024). Authorial ideology and intention in presentations of place in YA immigration narratives. Ubiquity: The Journal of Literature, Literacy, and the Arts, 9(2), 9-33.

Glenn, W. J. (2024). “It’s the forgetting that hurts most.”: Home in a narrative of forced emigration. The ALAN Review, 51(3), 42-51.

Glenn, W. J. (2024/2023 online). Fictional girls who play to play: Pushing on narratives of competition in YA sports literature. Sport, Education and Society, 29(8), 923-938.

Glenn, W. J., & Caasi, E. (2023). Teaching with disruptive aims: Countering narratives of Black women athletes in sports nonfiction for young people. The ALAN Review 50(2), 32-47.

Glenn, W. J. (2023). Designs of home: Living spaces as identity-shaping places. English Journal, 112(3), 64-70.

Ginsberg, R., & Glenn, W. J. (2022). “Everything is in us”: Collaboration, introspection, and continuity as healing in #NotYourPrincess. American Indian Quarterly, 46(1-2): 25-63.

Midgette, L., & Glenn, W. J. (2022). “It never starts with machetes”: Interrupting intergenerational transmission of biases through speculative YA fiction. The ALAN Review, 49(2), 30-41. [Recipient of the Nilsen-Donelson Award for best article published in the volume year]

Glenn, W. J., & Caasi, E. (2022). Gendered assumptions in the framing of fitness in sports nonfiction for young adult readers. Children’s Literature in Education, 53, 76-96.

Durand, S., Glenn, W. J., Moore, D., Groenke, S., & Scaramuzzo, P. (2021). Shaping immigration narratives in young adult literature: Authors and paratextual features of USBBY outstanding international books, 2006–2019. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 64(6), 665-674.

Curriculum Vitae