Kristiana Gregory grew up in Manhattan Beach, California, two blocks from the ocean. She's always loved to make up stories [ask her family!], telling her younger siblings whoppers that would leave them wide-eyed and shivering. Her first rejection letter at age ten was for a poem she wrote in class when she was supposed to be doing a math assignment. She's had a myriad of odd jobs: telephone operator, lifeguard, camp counselor, reporter, book reviewer & columnist for the LA Times, and finally author. Her award-winning books include STALKED, which earned the 2012 Gold Medal for Young Adult Mystery from Literary Classics and is hailed as "historical fiction with a thrilling twist." KIRKUS calls it "an atmospheric confection that will thrill YA readers ... Gregory achieves a realistic, rich atmosphere with insightful details about the immigration process and New York tenements in the early 1900s." Now available on Kindle and in paperback. JENNY OF THE TETONS [Harcourt] won the Golden Kite Award in 1989 and was the first of two-dozen historical novels for middle grade readers. Several of Kristiana's titles are now available on Kindle including "Curiously Odd Stories: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2" with the celebrated 'Paper Monument', a futuristic book-banning with horrific consequences. BRONTE'S BOOK CLUB [Holiday House] is set in a town by the sea and is inspired by the girls' book club Kristiana led for several years. Her most recent title with Scholastic's Dear America series is CANNONS AT DAWN, a sequel to the best-selling THE WINTER OF RED SNOW, which was made into a movie for the HBO Family Channel. New re-releases in ebooks and paperback on Amazon: **PRAIRIE RIVER SERIES #1-4 **ORPHAN RUNAWAYS: THE PERILOUS ESCAPE TO BODIE **CABIN CREEK MYSTERIES #7: THE PHANTOM OF HIDDEN HORSE RANCH **THE WAITING LIGHT: CLEMENTINE'S STORY—originally titled "My Darlin' Clementine" [Holiday House] this riveting historical mystery takes place in an Idaho mining camp of 1866, and was Idaho's representative for the 2010 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Library of Congress. Kristiana and her husband have two adult sons, and live in Idaho with their two golden retrievers. In her spare time she loves to swim, walk, hike, read, and hang out with friends. She's trying to learn to knit, but isn't yet having much success. Check out Kristiana's blogs at http://notesfromthesunroom.blogspot.com/ for behind-the-scenes stories about her books, and with photos from her childhood.

Karen Hesse is an American author of children's literature and literature for young adults, often with historical settings. Her novel Out of the Dust was the winner of the 1998 Newbery Medal and the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction. In 2002, Hesse was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. For more information, please see http://us.macmillan.com/author/karenh...

Kathryn Lasky is the American author of many critically acclaimed books, including several Dear America books, several Royal Diaries books, 1984 Newbery Honor winning Sugaring Time, The Night Journey, and the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series. She was born June 24, 1944, and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, and is married to Christopher Knight, with whom she lives in Massachusetts. Book 15, The War of the Ember, is currently the last book in the Ga'Hoole series. The Rise of a Legend is the 16th book but is a prequel to the series. Lasky has also written Guide Book To The Great Tree and Lost Tales Of Ga'Hoole which are companion books.

Ann Turner, also known and published as Ann Warren Turner, is a children's author and a poet. Ann Turner wrote her first story when she was eight years old. It was about a dragon and a dwarf named Puckity. She still uses that story when she talks to students about writing, to show them that they too have stories worth telling. Turner has always loved to write, but at first she was afraid she couldn't make a living doing it. So she trained to be a teacher instead. After a year of teaching, however, she decided she would rather write books than talk about them in school. Turner's first children's book was about vultures and was illustrated by her mother. She has written more than 40 books since then, most of them historical picture books. She likes to think of a character in a specific time and place in American history and then tell a story about that character so that readers today can know what it was like to live long ago. Ann Turner says that stories choose her, rather than the other way around: "I often feel as if I am walking along quietly, minding my own business, when a story creeps up behind me and taps me on the shoulder. 'Tell me, show me, write me!' it whispers in my ear. And if I don't tell that story, it wakes me up in the morning, shakes me out of my favorite afternoon nap, and insists upon being told." (from: http://www.eduplace.com/kids/tnc/mtai...)