Margarita Engle is the national Young People’s Poet Laureate, and the first Latino to receive that honor. She is the Cuban-American author of many verse novels, including The Surrender Tree, a Newbery Honor winner, and The Lightning Dreamer, a PEN Literary Award for Young Adult Literature winner.

Her verse memoir, Enchanted Air, received the Pura Belpré Award, a Walter Dean Myers Award Honor, and was a finalist for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction, among others.

Her picture book Drum Dream Girl received the Charlotte Zolotow Award. Margarita was born in Los Angeles, but developed a deep attachment to her mother’s homeland during childhood summers with relatives. She continues to visit Cuba as often as she can.

Sean Qualls is an award winning, Brooklyn-based children's book illustrator, artist, and author. He has illustrated a number of celebrated books for children, including, Giant Steps to Change the World by Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis-Lee, Little Cloud and Lady Wind by Toni and Slade Morrison, and Before Jon was a Jazz Giant, for which he received a Coretta Scott King Illustration Honour.

His work has received two Blue Ribbon citations from the Bulletin of the Centre for Children's Books, where he was also cited for his "serious craftsmanship" and "original stlye". He lives in Brooklyn (where you can find him DJing on occasion) with his wife, illustrator/author Selina Alko and their two children, Ginger and Isaiah.