I have repeatedly experienced the engaging, educational, and transformative powers of story; this is why my research often focuses on the intersections between literacy and literature. Thanks to Michael Halliday’s work (1984) we know that it is through meaningful language events that students learn. They learn language by “doing” language (listening, talking, reading, and writing), learn about language as they explore how language works, and learn through language as they use it to learn about subjects that are important to them. When I taught young and pre-adolescent children, I quickly realized that these meaningful language events often occur around engaging texts that have personal and collective meaning for students. It was this realization that prompted me to explore the diverse meaningful language events that can take place around texts for children and young adults, and the ways in which diverse readers, texts, educators, and educational settings interact to generate meaning and learning. Both my teaching and research frequently emphasize the important role of multicultural and international children’s and YA texts in multicultural education. I perceive multicultural education as the affirmation of diverse languages and cultures, and most importantly as the viewing of language and culture through critical lenses of equity and social justice. Appadurai has described the contemporary global context as an “infinitely varied mutual contest of sameness and difference.” In this context, comparative approaches are the most appropriate tools to explore literature for the purposes of both literary criticism and education. This is why I integrate comparative components in the courses I teach, in my published work, and in the projects I coordinate.Finally, I have always been interested in the intersections between literacy and technology, so this aspect is also often addressed in my work.