David Wiesner is one of the best-loved and most highly acclaimed picture book creators in the world. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and have won numerous awards in the United States and abroad.
Steven is a children’s author who writes and illustrate kids’ books about mutants fixing climate change, being a middle kid, chainsaws, beards, roller coasters, and dinosaurs. And he also paint landscapes and fish, too. Basically all the fun stuff.
Jon went to Culver Military Academy for high school. He had some spectacular teachers there, and became Lieutenant Scieszka.
Jon thought about being a doctor and studied both Science and English at Albion College in Albion, Michigan. He graduated in 1976, lived in Detroit, then moved to Brooklyn, NY to write instead. He earned his MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in New York in 1980, then painted apartments.
Vandana Singh is a multilingual author of Ambiguity Machines who has focused her writing and study on speculative fiction, biodiversity loss, imagination, and particle physics.
Carole Lindstrom is a New York Times best-selling and award-winning author of literature for young people, including the Caldecott Medal-winning WE ARE WATER PROTECTORS. She is Anishinaabe/Metis and an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. She is honored to write books that allow her to shine a light on her beautiful people and their strength and resilience. Her tribal homelands are in Belcourt, North Dakota, but she was born and raised in Nebraska and currently makes her home in Maryland.
David Bowles is a Mexican American author and translator from south Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley. He has written over two dozen award-winning titles, most notably They Call Me Güero and My Two Border Towns.
His work has also been published in multiple anthologies, plus venues such as The New York Times, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, School Library Journal, Rattle, Translation Review, and the Journal of Children’s Literature.
Fiona Barker is an audiologist, author, and mother passionate about literature, reading, and children’s education. She has published numerous children’s books such as Setsuko and the Song of the Sea, Danny and the Dream dog, and Amelie and the Great Outdoors.
Emma Reynolds is an illustrator and author based in Manchester, UK.
Her author-illustrator debut picture book Amara and the Bats about bat conservation, peaceful protest and community action is a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard, NSTA ‘Best in STEM’, and an Empathy Lab #ReadForEmpathy selection.
Katherine Applegate is the Newbery Medal-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author of numerous books for young readers, including The One and Only Ivan, the Endling series, Crenshaw, Wishtree, the Roscoe Riley Rules chapter books series, and the Animorphs series.
She lives with her husband, who writes as the author Michael Grant, and their children in California.
