About Sonia

​A member of the National Academy of Education, Sonia Nieto is Professor Emerita of Language, Literacy, and Culture, College of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her teaching has spanned early elementary through doctoral education and her research has focused on multicultural education, teacher education, literacy, and the education of students of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, with a special emphasis on Latin@ students. The author of dozens of journal articles and book chapters she has also written or edited 13 books, including a memoir, Brooklyn Dreams: My Life in Public Education (Harvard Education Press, 2015), and a co-authored book with her daughter Alicia López, an award-winning middle school ESL teacher, Teaching, a Life’s Work: A Mother-Daughter Dialogue (Teachers College Press, 2019). She is the founding editor of the Language, Culture, and Teaching series (Routledge Publishers) and inaugural editor of the Visions of Practice series (Teachers College Press). The first edition of her classic text, Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education (1992), was selected for the Museum of Education Readers’ Guide as “one of the 100 books that helped define the field of education in the 20th century.” Dr. Nieto has received dozens of awards for her scholarly work, teaching, activism, and advocacy, including 9 honorary doctorates and, most recently, the 2021 Governor’s Award in the Humanities from Mass Humanities, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the 2022 Lifelong Educator of the Year Award from NABE, the National Association for Bilingual Education. ​