Julie Anne Peters was born in Jamestown, New York. When she was five, her family moved to the Denver suburbs in Colorado. Her parents divorced when she was in high school. She has three siblings: a brother, John, and two younger sisters, Jeanne and Susan. Her books for young adults include Define "Normal" (2000), Keeping You a Secret (2003), Luna (2004), Far from Xanadu (2005), Between Mom and Jo (2006), grl2grl (2007), Rage: A Love Story (2009), By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead (2010), She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not... (2011), It's Our Prom (So Deal with It) (2012), and Lies My Girlfriend Told Me (2014). Her young adult fiction often feature lesbian characters and address LGBT issues. She has announced that she has retired from writing, and Lies My Girlfriend Told Me will be her last novel. She now works full-time for the Colorado Reading Corps.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is a widely praised author and professor. Edward Albee summed up her oeuvre in 1988: — "Boylan observes carefully, and with love. [Her] levitating wit is wisely tethered to a humane concern…. I often broke into laughter, and was now and again, struck with wonder." Jenny's memoir, She's Not There, published by Broadway Books in 2003, was one of the first bestselling works by a transgendered American; until 2001 she published under the name James Boylan. She's Not There, currently in its eighth printing, is popular both as a textbook in high schools and colleges as well as with readers' groups. The paperback edition contains a "readers guide" in addition to the main text, which consists not only of Jenny's insights on "a life in two genders" but also includes an afterword by Pultizer Prize winner Richard Russo, whose friendship with James, and later with Jennifer, provides part of the books narrative. She's Not There won an award from the Lambda LIterary Foundation in 2004, the year after its initial publication. The book has since been published in many foreign editions, and was an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Anna Quindlen called it “a very funny memoir of growing up confused, and a very smart consideration of what it means to be a woman.” Her 2008 memoir, I'm Looking Through You, is about growing up in a haunted house. While trans issues form part of the exposition of the book, the primary focus of I'm Looking Through You is on what it means to be "haunted," and how we all seek to find peace with our various ghosts, both the supernatural and the all-too-human. Jenny has been a frequent guest on a number of national television and radio programs, including three visits to the Oprah Winfrey Show. She has also appeared on the Larry King Show, The Today Show and been the subject of a documentary on CBS News’ 48 Hours. She has also appeared on a wide range of local and syndicated television shows, as well as NPR's Marketplace and the Diane Rehm show. In 2007 she played herself on two episodes of ABC's "All My Children." She has spoken widely around the country on gender and imagination, at venues including the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. and the New Jersey State Theatre. She has given plenary and keynote speeches at conferences on diversity and scholarship around the country, and at colleges and universities including Amherst, Wesleyan, Dartmouth, Columbia, Vanderbilt, Duke, Bucknell, Dickinson, Bates, Ohio State, Middlebury, Gettysburg, Georgia State, the University of Puget Sound, and Westminster College in Salt Lake City. She has spoken at law firms, at corporate events, and at bookstores from Seattle to Vermont. Her nonfiction has appeared on the op/ed pages of the New York Times, in GQ magazine, Allure, and Glamour. She is also an ongoing contributor to Conde Nast Traveler magazine; her most recent work there was on Easter Island, published in the January 2007 issue. Boylan's first book, a collection of stories entitled Remind Me To Murder You Later, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1988. Her first novel, The Planets, was published in 1991 by Poseidon Press. (Simon and Schuster). Loosely based upon the classical piece of music by Gustav Holst, The Planets followed the lives of several fictional characters in the real town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which has been afflicted by an underground coal fire since the early 1960s. Her second novel, The Constellations follows the lives of several of the characters from The Planets, some of whom flee from angry cows, discover a latex brain, and begin a life of dognapping. Her 1997 novel, Getting In, published by Warner Books, focused on four high school students who go on quests to get into college. The novel was optioned for film by Renny Harlin and Geena Davis, and Jenny was tapped to write the initial screenplay for New Line Cinema. Born in 1958 in Valley Forge, Boylan

Ask Ron Koertge what he brings to the realm of young adult fiction, and the seasoned author responds matter-of-factly. "I write dialogue well, and I'm funny," he says—an assessment few would argue with. "I like iconoclasm and practice it in my fiction. I don't like pretense or hypocrisy. I'm almost always irreverent." A faculty member for more than 35 years at Pasadena City College, where he has taught everything from Shakespeare to remedial writing, Ron Koertge is the author of several acclaimed novels, most of them for young adults. That Ron Koertge is a master at capturing teenagers' voices—often in witty repartee—is fully evident in MARGAUX WITH AN X, the story of a sharp-tongued beauty and a quirky, quick-witted loner. "MARGAUX WITH AN X started as a short story, but the heroine wouldn't let me alone," the author says. "She had a story to tell, and she wanted a whole novel to tell it in." Another unlikely pairing is found in STONER & SPAZ, Ron Koertge's funny, in-your-face tale of a young cinephile with cerebral palsy and the stoner who steals his heart. "My wife works with the disabled," the writer says of his inspiration for the novel, which quickly garnered critical acclaim. "One night she came home and told me about a young man she'd been working with. He had C.P. and a terrific sense of humor. Coincidentally, that day I had talked to a former student of mine who'd recently been in rehab for substance abuse. What would happen, I wondered, if those two knew each other?" In addition to his young adult novels, Ron Koertge writes poetry, and has been dubbed "the wisest, most entertaining wiseguy in American poetry" by poet-laureate Billy Collins. SHAKESPEARE BATS CLEANUP is narrated by a straight-talking, fourteen-year-old first baseman who has been benched by mono and decides to take a swing at writing poetry. Written entirely in free verse, with examples of several poetic forms slipped into the mix—including a sonnet, haiku, pastoral, and even a pantoum—SHAKESPEARE BATS CLEANUP is a veritable English teacher's dream. "The interest in SHAKESPEARE BATS CLEANUP is less with the arc of the plot than with the individual poems, some of which demonstrate poetic form, some of which tell the story," the author says. "One of my biggest challenges was to write like a fourteen-year-old who has a knack for writing poetry, and not just sound like a sixty-one-year-old pretending to be one!" The author's first book with Candlewick, THE BRIMSTONE JOURNALS, is also a novel written in free verse, with 15 different teenage characters narrating four or five poems each. "The book started to nag me a few months before the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, and I started to make notes in the form of poems," he says of the hauntingly prescient work. "BRIMSTONE needed to move at high velocity, and this form is perfect for that: no tail fins, no leather seats, no moon roof. Just get in and go." Ron Koertge grew up in an agricultural area in an old mining town in Illinois, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis, Missouri. There he learned to "drive a tractor and buck hay bales, which are clearly useful skills in Los Angeles," he quips. He and his wife live in South Pasadena, California.