Tonya Bolden is a critically acclaimed award-winning author/co-author/editor of more than two dozen books for young people. They include Finding Family which received two starred reviews and was a Kirkus Reviews and Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year; Maritcha: A Nineteenth-Century American Girl, a Coretta Scott King honor book and James Madison Book Award winner; MLK: Journey of a King, winner of a National Council of Teachers of English Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children; Emancipation Proclamation: Lincoln and the Dawn of Liberty, an ALSC Notable Children's Book, CBC/NCSS Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People, and winner of the NCSS Carter G. Woodson Middle Level Book Award.

Tonya also received the Children's Book Guild of Washington, DC's Nonfiction Award. A Princeton University magna cum laude baccalaureate with a master's degree from Columbia University, Tonya lives in New York City.

Eric Velasquez was born in Spanish Harlem and grew up in Harlem. He earned his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and has been illustrating for over 30 years. He has illustrated over 30 children's books; his first picturebook, The Piano Man by Debbie Chocolate, won the Coretta-Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent. In 2010, Eric was awarded an NAACP Image award for his work in Our Children Can Soar, which he collaborated on with 12 notable illustrators of children's literature.

Eric also wrote and illustrated Grandma's Records and its follow-up Grandma's Gift, which won the 2011 Pura Belpre Award for illustration and was nominated for a 2011 NAACP Image Award. His latest book, Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library by Carole Boston Weatherford, won the 2018 Walter Award and Golden Kite Award and was an International Latino Book Award Honorable Mention. Eric lives and works in New York, where he teaches book illustration at the Fashion Institute of Technology.