Ray Anthony Shepard is the author of Now or Never!: Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry's War to End Slavery, a Carter G. Woodson Award Honor Book and a Kirkus Reviews Best Children's Book, Runaway: The Daring Escape of Ona Judge, an ALSC and an NCSS Notable Book, and A Long Time Coming, which was a Booklist Editors' Choice and was a School Library Journal, a Kirkus, and a Bank Street Best Book.

R. Gregory Christie is a recipient of the Caldecott Honor, a winner of the NAACP Image award, and a six-time Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award honoree. His recent Calkins Creek books include Answering the Cry for Freedom by Gretchen Woelfle, which won the Carter G. Woodson Book Award, A Long Time Coming, which received best book citations from School Library Journal, Kirkus, and Bank Street, and Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop by Alice Faye Duncan, which received six starred reviews and for which Christie received the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor.