Dr. Dena Simmons is a lifelong learner, truth-teller, and abolitionist from the Bronx, New York. She is the founder of LiberatED, an organization that centers radical love, healing, and justice in education so that all children could live, learn, and thrive in the comfort of their own skin. She is also a visiting professor at the Institute for Racial Justice at Loyola University of Chicago and a Spring Point Partner Learner-in-Residence. She is the former Assistant Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, where she supported schools to use the power of emotions to create a more compassionate and just society. Prior to her work at the Center, Dena served as a middle school educator, teacher educator, diversity facilitator, and curriculum developer. She has been a leading voice on teacher education and has written and spoken across the country about social and racial justice pedagogy, diversity, emotional intelligence, and bullying in K-12 school settings, including the White House, the inaugural Obama Foundation Summit, the United Nations, two TEDx talks, a TED talk on Broadway, and Oprah’s OWN series, Speak Sis. Dr. Simmons has been profiled in Education Week, Edutopia, Learning for Justice, the Huffington Post, NPR, the AOL/PBS project, MAKERS: Women Who Make America, and a Beacon Press Book, Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists. Dena is a recipient of a Harry S. Truman Scholarship, a J. William Fulbright Fellowship, an Education Pioneers Fellowship, a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, a Phillips Exeter Academy Dissertation Fellowship, a Hedgebrook Writing Residency, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellowship, and an Arthur Vining Davis Aspen Fellowship among others. She earned her doctorate degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, where she served as faculty in the Summer Principals Academy.