Judith Rossell is the multi-award-winning author-illustrator of the bestselling Stella Montgomery series (Withering-by-Sea, Wormwood Mire, A Garden of Lilies and the upcoming Wakestone Hall).

Before beginning her career in children's books, Judith worked as a government scientist (not a mad scientist, a normal kind of scientist) and also for a cotton-spinning company (that made threads for T-shirts and denim jeans and mops and teabag strings).

Judith has written thirteen books and illustrated more than eighty, and her work has been published in the US, UK and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Judith lives in Melbourne, Australia with a cat the size of a walrus.

Michael Parker is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, Runner's World, Men's Journal, and other publications. His work has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize. He is the Nicholas and Nancy Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He lives in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas.