With over thirty four million books in print, Jan Brett is one of the nation’s foremost author illustrators of children’s books. Jan lives in a seacoast town in Massachusetts, close to where she grew up. During the summer her family moves to a home in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts.As a child, Jan Brett decided to be an illustrator and spent many hours reading and drawing. She says, “I remember the special quiet of rainy days when I felt that I could enter the pages of my beautiful picture books. Now I try to recreate that feeling of believing that the imaginary place I’m drawing really exists. The detail in my work helps to convince me, and I hope others as well, that such places might be real.”
Clive Staples Lewis was a British writer, who authored more than 30 books during his prolific career, both fiction (most famously The Chronicles of Narnia) and non-fiction (including such classics as Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters). A professor at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, Lewis was a contemporary with J.R.R. Tolkein, with whom he was also close friends—both were members of a group called the Inklings. Later in life, Lewis married Joy Davidman and gained two stepsons—Douglas and David Gresham. Lewis died at the age of 64 from kidney failure.
Stevie Lewis has been living on the road in a van (she built out herself!) for the past 3 years, furthering her passion for climbing, art, and the outdoors. Striving to live simply and tread lightly on the earth, she gathers inspiration from a variety of places, be it climbing in the high desert at Smith Rock State Park, hiking and foraging for wild plants in the forests of southeastern Alaska, or sharing stories with fellow travelers around a campfire. After working for several years at DreamWorks Animation Studios, she now illustrates children’s books and creates art based on her travels. Her latest illustrated work includes Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack, Lost in the Library by Josh Funk, the Finding Serendipity series by Angelica Banks, and the upcoming SUN! One in a Billion by Stacy McAnulty.
G. Neri is the Coretta Scott King honor-winning author of Yummy: the Last Days of a Southside Shorty and the recipient of the Lee Bennett Hopkins Promising Poet Award for his free-verse novella, Chess Rumble. His books have been translated into multiple languages in over 25 countries. They include the novels Tru & Nelle, A Christmas Tale, Ghetto Cowboy, and the free-verse picture book bios, Hello, I’m Johnny Cash and When Paul Met Artie. In 2017, he was awarded a National Science Foundation grant that sent him to Antarctica to research a new book. He currently lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida with his wife and daughter, where he swims with manatees and occasionally, an alligator.