Five TAA members have been elected to the TAA Council, the association’s governing board. Paul Krieger has been elected Vice President/President-Elect, Juli Saitz has been elected to a third term as Treasurer, and Brenda Ulrich has been elected to a second term as Secretary. Stacie Craft DeFreitas and Dione Taylor have been elected to Council positions.

Krieger, a retired professor of biology, is the author and illustrator of the four-book series, The Visual Analogy Guides. In his position statement, he said he intends to focus on three major goals as VP/President-Elect: (1) Help TAA remain true to its mission of supporting textbook and academic authors as it has done so impressively over the years; (2) Assist the recently established Committee for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (CDEI) to achieve its goals; and (3) Explore new sources of revenue to keep TAA on solid financial ground in the future. Krieger will serve a two-year term as VP, a two-year term as President, and a two-year term as Past-President.

Saitz leads the contract and royalty compliance practice at Ankura and has extensive experience serving clients including several textbook authors. Ulrich is an intellectual property lawyer with a focus on publishing, higher education, copyright and trademark law. They will both serve two-year terms.

DeFreitas is a licensed psychologist as well as the Interim Associate Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and an Associate Professorof Psychology at the University of Houston-Downtown. She is also the author of African American Psychology: A Positive Psychology Perspective, which won a TAA 2021 Most Promising New Textbook Award. She currently serves on TAA’s Committee for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, formed last year.

Taylor is in her 21st year as the Director of the Pupil Personnel Services, School Counseling program in the School of Education at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. She also currently serves on TAA’s Committee for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Council Members serve three-year terms. All terms start July 1, 2021.