Cory McCarthy writes for children and young adults, including their verse novel, Name Me America, which won the middle grade category of the 2014 Katherine Paterson Prize from Hunger Mountain, and Breaking Sky, currently under option with Sony Pictures. They hold a degree in poetry from Ohio University and an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Like Kahlil Gibran, their family emigrated from Lebanon and settled in New England. Cory McCarthy lives in Vermont with their family and is on faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Ekua Holmes is the illustrator of numerous books for children, including Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement by Carole Boston Weatherford, for which she received several awards, including a Caldecott Honor, the John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator Award, and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor; Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets by Kwame Alexander, Chris Colderley, and Marjory Wentworth, for which she received the 2018 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award; and The Stuff of Stars by Marion Dane Bauer, for which she received the 2019 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award. Ekua Holmes lives in Boston.