Audrey Vernick is an American children's book author whose works include many featuring lesser-known figures in baseball history, including Larry Doby, Edith Houghton, Effa Manley, Max Patkin, and the Acerra brothers.
A picture book combines visual and verbal narratives in a book format, most often aimed at young children. With the narrative told primarily through text, they are distinct from comics, which do so primarily through sequential images. The images in picture books can be produced in a range of media, such as oil paints, acrylics, watercolor, and pencil. Picture books often serve as pedagogical resources, aiding with children's language development or understanding of the world.
Mary Pope Osborne is an American author of children's books. She is best known as the author of the Magic Tree House series, which as of 2017 sold more than 134 million copies worldwide. Both the series and Osborne have won awards, sometimes for Osborne's charitable efforts at promoting children's literacy. One of four children, Osborne moved around in her childhood before attending the University of North Carolina. Following college, Osborne traveled before moving to New York City. She somewhat spontaneously began to write, with her first book being published in 1982. She would go on to write a variety of other kinds of children's and young adult books before starting the Magic Tree House series in 1992. Osborne's sister Natalie Pope Boyce has written several compendium books to the Magic Tree House series, sometimes with Osborne's husband Will.
Andrew Elborn Clements was an American author of children's literature. His debut novel Frindle won an award determined by the vote of U.S. schoolchildren in about 20 different U.S. states. In June 2015, Frindle was named the Phoenix Award winner for 2016, as it was the best book that did not win a major award when it was published.
Gary Anthony Soto is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist.
Paul Fleischman is an American writer of children's books. He and his father Sid Fleischman have both won the Newbery Medal from the American Library Association recognizing the year's "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children". For the body of his work he was the United States author nominee for the international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2012.
Anastasia Krupnik (1979) is the first book of a popular series of middle-grade novels by Lois Lowry, depicting the title character's life as a girl "just trying to grow up." Anastasia deals with everyday problems such as popularity, the wart on her thumb or the new arrival of her little brother, Sam. The book is written in episodic fashion, each chapter self-contained with minimal narrative link to the others. At the end of each chapter is a list written by Anastasia, listing her likes and dislikes, showing the character's growth and development through the story.
Jerry Pinkney was an American illustrator and writer of children's literature. Pinkney illustrated over 100 books since 1964, including picture books, nonfiction titles and novels. Pinkney's works addressed diverse themes and were usually done in watercolors.
Walter Dean Myers was an American writer of children's books best known for young adult literature. He was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, but was raised in Harlem. A tough childhood led him to writing and his school teachers would encourage him in this habit as a way to express himself. He wrote more than one hundred books including picture books and nonfiction. He won the Coretta Scott King Award for African-American authors five times. His 1988 novel Fallen Angels is one of the books most frequently challenged in the U.S. because of its adult language and its realistic depiction of the Vietnam War.
Marissa Moss is an American children's book author.
Jabari Asim is an author, poet, playwright, and professor of writing, literature and publishing at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Crisis magazine, a journal of politics, ideas and culture published by the NAACP and founded by historian and social activist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910. In February 2019 he was named Emerson College's inaugural Elma Lewis ’43 Distinguished Fellow in the Social Justice Center. In September 2022 he was named Emerson College Distinguished Professor of Multidisciplinary Letters.
Rafael López is an internationally recognized illustrator and artist. To reflect the lives of all young people, his illustrations bring diverse characters to children's books. As a children's book illustrator, he has received three Pura Belpré Award medals from the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), and REFORMA in 2020 for Dancing Hands: How Teresa Carreño Played the Piano for President Lincoln,Drum Dream Girl in 2016 and Book Fiesta! in 2010. He created the National Book Festival Poster for the Library of Congress and was a featured book festival speaker at this event.
The California Young Reader Medal is a set of five annual literary awards conferred upon picture books and fiction books selected by vote of California schoolchildren from a ballot prepared by committee. The program was established in 1974 with Intermediate, Primary, and Young Adult Medals that were inaugurated in 1975, 1976, and 1977 and were conferred biennially, and annually beginning in 1983.
Carol Gorman is an American writer of children's fiction. She originally aspired to be an actress, and for a few years taught seventh grade at an Iowan middle school. Inspired by her husband and fellow author, Ed Gorman, she began writing in the mid-1980s. With over 22 books published under several names, Carol Gorman continues to write and teach.
Edith Grace Houghton was an American professional baseball player and scout. A former shortstop in women's baseball whose professional career began when she was ten years old, Houghton became the first female scout in Major League Baseball when she joined the talent-spotting staff of the Philadelphia Phillies of the National League in 1946. She served in that role until 1952, when she returned to active service in the United States Navy. She had joined the WAVES during World War II.
Gabi Swiatkowska is a Polish-born artist, musician, and children's author and illustrator. She has shown up twice on the ALA Notable Book Award list. One of the books that she illustrated, My Name Is Yoon, won the Ezra Jack Keats Award and is on the New York Public Library's list of 100 Great Children's Books
Edith Thacher Hurd was an American writer of children's books. She published 70 books in her lifetime, fifty of them illustrated by her husband, Clement Hurd.
Don Tate is an American author and illustrator of books for children. He is also an activist promoting racial and cultural inclusiveness in children's literature. He notes that as a child he had to read the encyclopedia to discover a multicultural world; based on the children's books of his day he "thought the world was white". He co-founded the young African American blog The Brown Bookshelf and helps run the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign to improve diversity of material in children's books.
Last Stop on Market Street is a 2015 children's book written by American author Matt de la Peña and illustrated by Christian Robinson, which won the 2016 Newbery Medal, a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor, and a Caldecott Honor. The book follows a young boy named CJ as he learns to appreciate the beauty in everyday things during a bus ride. De la Peña and Robinson both drew on personal experiences when working together to create the book. Through its story and illustrations, Last Stop on Market Street tackles issues of race and class as they may be seen through the eyes of a young teen. Last Stop on Market Street was met with widespread acclaim after its release, receiving positive reviews from Kirkus Reviews and the New York Times Book Review amongst many others. Last Stop on Market Street's Newbery win was monumental, as it is extremely rare for picture books to be awarded this medal. In 2018, the children's book was adapted into a children's musical which has been performed by various children's theater groups across the country.
Raúl the Third is a Mexican American artist and illustrator.
Harry Allard was an American writer of children's books. Many of his books have received awards; a few have also been banned and challenged in the United States.